SOMNAMBULIT

The Ten Questions

2009-07-08T14:35:00.004-05:00

...by Bernard Pivot that host James Lipton asks every one of his guests on The Actors Studio:

1. What is your favorite word?
Beautiful.

2. What is your least favorite word?
Killed.

3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually or emotionally?
The movies, because they combine every art form I'm interested in separately (painting, dance, fashion, architecture, literature, music) into something new.

4. What turns you off?
Intolerant, mean, hateful, condescending or entitled behavior, and anyone's attempt to acquire my freedom.

5. What is your favorite curse word?
Motherf*cker.

6. What sound or noise do you love?
Rain on the roof at night.

7. What sound or noise do you hate?
Ambulance or police sirens.

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
Movie director or cinematographer, or circus performer.

9. What profession would you not like to do?
Heavy manual labor (garbage collector, ditch-digger).

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?
"Rachel, my dear, I am extremely surprised to see you here, considering you are an atheist and YOU don't believe in Heaven. Please, enjoy a cigarette."

PERFORMANCE PIECES

2009-06-30T11:47:00.009-05:00

From Nohegen performance, 2006, as Jean-Fromage, wife of Crisco, the famous French installation artist.

This section will grow as I'm able to adapt video documentation to viewing on the web.

"Vows" piece from Anti(dote)Wedding

View on ExposureRoom

Anti(dote)Wedding Performance and Exhibition, August 14, 2009

"Death of Orpheus," from Metamorpheus, 1990.

View on ExposureRoom

My Dream of Linda Montano in the Purple Chakra (1998)

2009-06-30T11:46:00.003-05:00

Once upon a time I dreamed my husband and daughter and I were in a toy store shopping for stuffed animals that resembled Beatrix Potter's drawings of Peter Rabbit. When we left the toyshop we noticed a brass plaque that read, "Antiques and Imports" and a corridor that led around the corner.

We found ourselves in a dim entrance hall that seemed to lengthen and broaden as we walked into it, like a Cinerama movie effect. We saw antique furniture, Turkish rugs, floor lamps and crystal chandeliers in the distance in a beautiful room down the corridor, but we could only see them dimly, since the room wasn't well-illuminated and dusk was falling. When we entered the room full of antiques we felt it was alive, trembling with a slight breeze, and a few autumn leaves twirled in the air currents surrounding a huge chandelier -- very Jean Cocteau. My husband said, "This is someone's home, not a shop," and, for an instant, I felt embarrassed. Then we heard a woman's voice in the distance call, "I'm coming!"

A woman very like Linda Montano wheeled herself into the room in an ornate Victorian wicker wheelchair. She reminded me somehow of Miss Havisham from Dickens' Great Expectations. She seemed very eccentric and smiled mischievously. Three serene young students in black turtleneck sweaters attended Linda in her wheelchair. Linda said, "So, you've come to see the beautiful things," and beckoned for us to follow her.

Then we were in a tiny kitchen. One of Linda's smiling young attendants stirred an ambrosial concoction of stewed peaches simmering in a black cast iron cauldron on the stove. Linda turned to me and said, "You must do exactly as I say, and you must always remember to clean up everything that needs cleaning up."

With those words, she impishly dumped the peaches onto the Turkish-carpeted floor. I knelt with a dishtowel to clean up the mess, but it vanished magically into thin air. Linda laughed a delightful, tinkling laugh.

Linda said there was a movie theatre deep in the recesses of her home and she invited my daughter and husband to wait for me there. A movie was playing that they had very much wanted to see, so my husband and daughter went in. I could then see inside the theatre from outside, as if it were made of glass or I was God, and I observed my daughter happily watching the movie with other members of the audience, munching away on a sack-lunch sandwich I had prepared for her earlier. My husband sat with another male spectator on a bench like you'd find at a bus stop turned at an oblique angle from the movie screen, reading a newspaper, as if he were slightly bored.

Outside in a little plaza, Linda taught me a beautiful song, and, as I sang it, I began to rise magically into the air. I rose into the branches of a frozen tree where icy crystals from chandeliers shimmered. I was overjoyed that I could fly, but then discovered with horror that my beloved bulldog was frozen among the tree's highest branches, his eyes lifeless and glazed over with frost.

Linda called out to me from below, "Sometimes you'll be afraid!" and kept singing the beautiful song. I took my dog from the tree's limbs and he immediately warmed and wiggled to life in my arms as we flew among the branches.

But then, a real-life noise outside my window woke me up. The melody of the song Linda taught me rang in my ears for a few seconds longer -- a little, short mantra of a song, like beautiful, magical tinkling bells.

Linda Montano: 7 Hours Sounding the Chakras (1997)

2009-06-30T11:32:00.010-05:00

7 Hours Sounding the Chakras

Performed by Linda M. Montano and Ellen Fullman

Sunday, April 27, 1997

The Candy Factory, Austin, Texas

Chakra 1: Sex Red Perineum Dutch

4:28: It has begun. Light drizzle outside. It seems there are fears of technical problems this year. One of Linda’s microphones keeps going dead. Yesterday Linda made the rubbing tears from her eyes gesture to show the technical people she was sad when there was trouble. I hope Ellen and the three guys who are making the sound have it all worked out today. I don’t see how Linda can do this kind of work if she can’t trust the electronic things. It’s hard enough without having to worry about that.

The long-string instrument sounds now are quiet, tentative and sporadic. Linda is also quiet, just a low hum at this point. It seems really relaxing right now. Just now a layer of processing came on and the technology involved in the piece this year becomes evident. It started off gently and low-tech. Now the first layers are building up – harmonic, but Linda like a low ghost outside. Now the first reverb on the reader. Ellen playing percussively like some kind of oriental instrument. I don’t feel like I’m here yet. I’m ready to be here and want to be here, but I’m still distracted by the logistics of getting everything set up. Always I’m afraid I’ll forget what to do next, or who or what comes next, although the instructions are so simple. This time we are changing chakras at seven minutes after the hour, not on the top of the hour, and that’s a little harder to keep track of. The Dutch is kind of choppy and percussive. I think I hear the names of people I almost recognize. Linda is very quiet and only a low melodic moan right now – like the wind outside on a cold winter night or the Theremin in a horror movie. Pleasant – opening now – vibrating – like peering into the center of a red poppy as it opens in time-lapse scientific films.

Now Linda is really quiet. I can’t tell if she is really into this yet. I feel like I am protecting her. I had the image of a nun who sits by the bedside of a patient in some turn-of-the-century hospital or asylum when I sat down. Maybe it’s because Linda’s in a baby bed this year – I somehow feel it is my job to protect her and watch over her during this meditation. I had a fear the baby bed might not support the weight of an adult – probably because I always had the desire to get into the baby bed myself when my children were small. I thought – or knew very well – it would break. I did get in the playpen, though. My children never liked baby beds or playpens – like jails. I remember the scary iron hospital baby bed when Alexander had pneumonia and they wouldn’t even let me pick him up due to his high fever and he held out his little arms to me through the bars.

She is sitting upright now – lotus position. Alton helped me get her to the bed. She is wearing a long wild-woman wig with x’s taped over her eyes, orange polka-dot sari, orange socks. I could turn and look at her if I wanted to, I suppose. She has a homemade pastel afghan with her in the crib – mainly yellow. Alton is high and vertical – very beautiful white courtly costume, like Casanova, powdered wig, high white heels, ruffles.

Now there’s a ghostly, almost celestial angelic singing, space-age hurtle, buzz of long-string instrument, Sputnik feedback. Linda’s voice treble and tentative, small sounds, intimate, random, like when you turn over in bed. Now she’s going into a repetitive tunnel-like sound that escalates and echoes in on itself – loud – drowns out the Dutch – ebbs and dissipates now in the distance – concentric circles like drops of rain in water puddles.

Ellen’s patterns emerging now. It got really intense for a moment, then tapered down. Echo of Henk’s voice. I keep thinking I hear words I understand: "outside," and, once, "hotel."

Space mice. A kind of chewing sound, like diddling with the strings on the end of the guitar that’s not made for playing – that part that can’t be tuned. I always wanted to play instruments the wrong way; I wanted to play the piano from the inside, rather than using the keyboard and felted mallets of the machinery. I always wanted to crawl inside a grand piano and play it like a harp, play the guitar upside down. Five or seven minutes to go in clearing this one – I’m starting to get here now.

Linda’s screaming as if being tortured on the longstring instrument. She’s screaming like someone falling off a cliff in a movie, falling into a well that goes on to Eternity.

Chakra 2: Security Orange Pelvis Polish

5:07: It’s weird hearing Bogdan in Polish – knowing him for ten years now, but never having heard him speak in his own language. There’s a giggling coming from Linda, and also the sound of something going noisily down the drain – like a whirlpool of water, very moist and slippery. One of the sound men came to check the level of Linda’s microphone. I can hear her, but I don’t know if others can. I keep thinking I hear Bogdan saying things I understand: "I believe," "Possible." It seems as if he’s either reading a book about theology, or refuting theology. Again I seem to hear names in English that I recognize. Now Linda is taking off, swooping, coming back down, like a bird taking flight in stages – housetop, treetop, powerline, sky. Transitions. Now Bogdan seemed to say, "If you are even here," and Linda’s sound is very small circles, like colored pebbles in a stream. Small sounds, encapsulated, then bursting into more tortured cries – the needing sound – like you need water, or for the dentist to stop hurting you – now dying down and very small again, but repetitive, like the links in a chain, primarily breathing that rises to clarify into a treble tone. I’m starting to feel all here now. Delay happening and echo of voice, very dramatic. Strings clang like the percussion in a movie underscoring some horror. Now the instrument sounds like a violin – definitive, authoritative, now a shimmer. I turned to look at Linda; she’s holding the bars of the crib and rocking back and forth like a child who’s waiting for you to come get him/her out of the bed. Just waiting, not howling yet, making small sounds to comfort herself – now widening into a louder and more melancholy sound. "Find me." Now some kind of guttural, threatening sounds. "It’s elusive." Halfway through this chakra now, Bogdan sounds very patient and understanding. Linda is quieting down, just "Hmm?" or "Um-hmm." Ellen just broke a string on the instrument, and that was dramatic – a heavy clamp fell on the floor – then she moved over to the middle register which sounds the most like strings. I feel another layer of voices in the electronic mix at the far end of the room – spaceman talk, not Linda, jabbering like the voices of workmen heard down a sewage pipe when you’re a child and playing hide-and-seek. Linda’s voice constant and brown now, like an earthly grounding. Wide strip going harmonic. I don’t know who the spacemen are – like they are part of an intercepted transmission – space party line. Linda celestial and falling from time to time, then high up, like someone climbing a tree or going out onto the balcony of a high building. Maybe it’s Bogdan who’s the spaceman. Maybe somehow it’s his own delay they’ve made so scratchy and metallic. Something else just flew off the instrument – very exciting when that happens. She restrung the broken string and now the pattern we hear is tuning. "Distance." "Poco-poco." People are coming and going from the space. I see Gloria is here. So far, all the train connections are working. I have so little "business" to do this year. I feel remarkably empty and feel no need. I like the feeling this year of being "in service" or "of service." I like to show the icons when it’s time. I like the feeling of serving and then disappearing; that’s possible with strangers, but impossible with family members. With family, resentment sometimes rises. With strangers, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event and you can easily extend yourself charitably. With family, it’s twenty-four hours, seven days a week – harder work. Some roaring sounds from Linda – getting fiercer, resolving on same note instrument plays.

Chakra 3: Courage Yellow Solar Plexus Chinese

6:18: Linda had to go to the bathroom, and Alton was nowhere to be found, so I took her. Luckily Hud was in a mental state where he could help me. Scary, trying to get her out of the baby bed when I wasn’t expecting it. What will coming out of the piece do to her torque?

A big scream – first for a long time. She was bouncing up and down on the mattress, and now it’s getting serious. A screaming roar, enraged, filling the space, expanding, now a sort of resolution, a kind of heartbeat, then sonic reverberation. These are scary sounds, the kind of feral, demonic possession sounds that really rattled me last year. These sounds are excruciating, make your hair stand on end. Chinese sounds so polite – swishy and contained like reeds at the edge of water – sailboat at sunset gliding over a lake, like a see-saw negotiation, a pleasant give-and-take. Now Linda and the instrument more and more make call and response – instrument sounds, Linda growls at the tone, polite Chinese makes a falling pitter-patter pattern over all of it, like rain. But there’s static at the back of the room, a metallic rattle. Linda’s voice low, almost masculine and like the sound of a wheel, string shimmer. I feel like I hear voices outside, loud ones in the front room. Linda’s students performing? The most intense sounds so far – hacking, phlegmatic, the terminal smoker’s cough, now shrill and quieter, one tone. "Where are you?" The teasing, playful hide-and-seek question of a child, like a song suddenly remembered from childhood. I thought Gloria said, "Say how kind?" Starry planetary music ascending, twinkling high above. Linda very calm. Sounds loop a pattern and blink like little space signals, like red lights on a radio tower. "You shall teach." "Should be told." As with Bogdan, it’s odd to me to hear Gloria read Chinese, since I know her well and never heard her speak Chinese before. Linda is very quiet, only rocking slightly in her crib, saying "No, no," with her head, now nodding, "Yes," slight panting like breathing in labor or having sex, rhythmic, relaxing. I think I could go to sleep. Stereophonic-harmony-tone is split in two. She’s making the mattress bounce like slow repetitive sex. Can’t tell if the sound of the mattress itself is what’s being amplified. Victor is next – the only one I’m truly worried about showing up since he didn’t come to rehearsal yesterday. Linda said she talked to him and he will for sure be here. That was the bad chakra last year, when the woman was late and I was so angry at her. This sound is good, a slinging, as Linda makes "No, no" head. Locust-like incessant whisper fills the room – the "schwa" of Chinese and Ellen plays her response, wind picks her up and she sails. Very quiet now, only wind, laughter from somewhere, footsteps on floorboards, witnesses in loud shoes. It’s getting dark outside. Good – now I see Victor. Dark wind forest. When I sit back down, the piece of paper with the orange word "fabric" is always back in the chair when I come back. I don’t know what it means. I folded it up and put it in a bag, not mine – Gloria’s? – that appeared by chair and now it’s back. The performers out in the front room are very loud. "Woo-woo" -- they look like Marie-Antoinette sexy wig flower-festooned nymphs out of some kind of crazy Watteau painting.

Chakra 4: Compassion Green Chest Spanish

7:07: I think I am going to eat some bread. The sound has established a groove, dark blue, comforting. Linda’s rocking and singing a "la-la" song – or is it a Church chant? Reverberates like in stone cloisters and I almost think I hear a distant rock guitar. The tawdry girls are back with candles. There was a profoundly beautiful passage just a minute ago – Linda was in a rare place with her voice. I thought I heard "This is the lost boy. This is the lost man." There is too much frivolous noise going on out front in the performance room. It needs to be quieter, but maybe that’s the lesson for me to learn during "compassion." They are definitely putting themselves out there in a playful way, but it intrudes on the sacred space the meditation’s created. Alton’s standing up here at the front, tall, white, vertical, like some kind of authoritarian French clown. I don’t know if Linda’s aware of anyone’s presence or even what she hears, for that matter. Don’t know if she’s tranced out now, or what. I am definitely more aware of mundane details this year – no profound thoughts coming to me. I guess I’m emptied out from all I’ve recently been through, and therapy. My left shoulder has been itching all through this chakra. Now a procession of Alton and the girls and a guy with a video camera. "Is it enough?" I understand Victor to say. It sounds like part of a recognizable composition on the instrument right now – like something for the cello, with a classical meter. Linda floats on top of it all, spacey and celestial. The strings have laid down a basketweave rhythm and Linda weaves in and out of the spaces. The tortured, quivering voice of an old lady joins in sometimes. The sound men are able to keep the sound in the room for a long time, filling the space, stretching it out until it fills up the entire area, like pulling on the edges of something to stretch it. Linda now singing a sweet, high, childish Ave Maria on top of everything. This is really a beautiful moment, the most transcendently beautiful so far. She answers herself with a few notes in a low register, low and sustained, like monks. It’s like monks and nuns singing back and forth between hillside monasteries and convents with a valley in between them. I hear the sound of a tinny transistor radio, and here come the girls again.

Chakra 5: Communication Blue Throat French

8:07: Linda is at a low, moaning spot, and Danielle’s voice sounds like two sometimes. Now Linda’s set up a pant, a sawing of breath. She’s all wrapped up in the afghan now, horrible cough again, clearing, clearing. Now quiet except for space laser sounds coming out of the processor. I think they need to punch up the reader’s microphone. There is a guy standing over my shoulder reading what I am writing. Strange – no one has ever come so close to the space where Linda is before. He is looking at everything and all the equipment. Linda is probably not even aware he is here. He smiled, not threatening, except he was a male presence and made me think weird thoughts about what would I do if he tried to do something to Linda, what would I do to protect her. Of course anything can happen! She’s using her hands over her mouth and screaming. The sound reverberates off the long wires. Sounds pretty scary right now. Linda dropped out – just the sound of French now, just a single, sporadic note from the instrument. Then an adrenaline high-pitched string like a fear reaction comes out of left field. Linda is really screaming now, a kind of strained, distant muffled scream, like screams heard through a pillow if someone’s trying to muffle them. It’s getting to be pretty hypnotic now. More childhood terror screams. This is really intense. She whistles, then screams. I think I smell Mentholatum as she’s screaming – why is that? Definitely a menthol smell. Is it really in the space, or is it a nervous system hallucination from the meditation? Sounds like there’s a train in the distance. I feel I am getting numb. Danielle was saying "blue" and "pink." My mind is wandering. I thought I might write to some people from inside the meditation this year, but it isn’t happening. Linda is very still, in yoga position, sound rolling out of her. What must it be like for her? I can’t imagine. Long string instrument again sounding like a violin – short, bowing gestures. Linda saying, "Oh, nonononono," it sounds like. It must be terribly hard to do this kind of work, so consummately private and the opposite of dramatic. Seems like it would be nearly impossible to share this work – needs witnesses, to honor her teacher? It’s sounding like ghosts in a haunted house now. Whatever the mint smell is – she’s coughing and screaming now, as if she’s in agony. I can taste the mint in my mouth. I thought I heard someone knocking outside the window. Someone comes in wearing very loud shoes. Linda is very quiet, reader’s voice doubled. Time is crawling for me now.

Chakra 6: Intuition Purple Forehead Japanese

9:07: Linda is up in a frequency only bats could hear. The Japanese is soothing, and there’s a drumming coming from somewhere – probably part of the processing. It keeps startling me because it sounds like someone’s knocking. I see Luke, but not Anastasia. Guess she decided to stay home. Probably tired. Linda was screaming, "What?" and it echoed dozens of times.

Chakra 7: Joy White Top of Head Spanish

10:07: The readers’ voices predominate now; the instrument is like quiet, sporadic bowing, like wind blowing against a rusty roof. Linda laughs and it gets picked up into echo and becomes a pained sobbing – so hard to tell if it’s laughing or crying – then screaming – more bowing instrument – then laughing so hard she has a coughing attack. I like it when the sound bounces up against itself, the echo and the sustained, real-time voice. "You people," "you women," "the rhumba," "the flowers," "the fruit." Spanish, like French, is bad because I just have to force my mind to agree not to try to figure out the words’ meanings, just let them wash over me instead. Hard to tell if the two readers are reading together, or separately. I see someone down on the floor in the long-string area: Ellen is lying on the floor playing on her side. I keep thinking I hear horns – maybe pre-recorded? Now celestial Linda voice like an orchestra tuning up to the violin. "The happy," "the kisses," "the house," "the dreams," "the shadows." Only a little over half an hour to go. I feel like I’m going mad now, not that I’m being cleared. My costume hurts me, my hair hurts me, my stomach hurts me, my brain hurts me. I hear the chanting quality again in Linda’s voice – sustaining a tone into what seems to be eternity. Funny that one of the last images I’ll see in this space is of a two-headed woman, since the two readers are wrapped and pinned together with one long scarf. Funny, because it was here in this space that the two-headed woman was born during the soap. Linda laughs breathlessly and the long-string instruments sounds strangely like a bandoneon playing a tango for an instant. Low hum from Linda like a diggerydoo – sounds like a man because the computer is dropping her pitch. Sounds like those ancient instruments you swing in a circle over your head – bull roarer? The voice of the gods? I could tell, when I walked the whole length of the instrument before that I’m nearly tripping now, feeling far, far from normal. Anti-gravity, buoyant, but also goofy. I can taste that my breath smells bad. I need coffee. I wonder what the weather is like now. Could it be raining? What will happen when this is over? Will it end up making a crescendo, or will it just end abruptly and in a random way? Linda laughs, trails off. The readers are amazing reading in unison. How do they know what they will say next? They can’t have rehearsed yet they seem to read in unison. Now Linda is soaring above the readers and the instrument sounds like sobbing. I want to close my eyes so badly and just let it wash over me, but I know I’ll go to sleep if I do. This final passage is just washing over everyone here – as if there’s a kind of unity. Hard to imagine how it will end. Ellen must have an eye on a clock, unless she’s just responding to Linda for seven hours and doesn’t know or care. It would be cheesy if there was a big, theatrical finish, a swell, a flourish. Maybe Fate will just take care of it quietly.

"Oh, yes, we can stop them."

Linda Montano: 7 Hours Sounding the Chakras (1996)

2009-06-30T11:31:00.006-05:00

7 Hours Sounding the Chakras

Performed by Linda M. Montano and Ellen Fullman

Sunday, February 11, 1996

The Candy Factory, Austin, Texas

Chakra 1: Sex Red Perineum

4:15: Kerthy is telling her sexual history and the meditation has begun. When Linda is really moaning, it shakes the platform like winds outside the window during a thunderstorm -- Wuthering Heights ghosts while you try to sleep in a bed. There are about twelve people here watching right now; most of them are young, college-age, one older, sterling-haired woman smiling -- a devotee of Linda's perhaps? Kerthy is topless with a big red costume like the Birth of Venus clamshell. The long string instrument makes a drone that is really beautiful and soothing at this point -- wonder how it will sound to me in eight hours? I realized the wires remind me of the overhead wires in the train stations when you pull into Milan or Rome. It's like Ellen's playing power lines, like telephone wires down a highway, walking along like a tightrope walker, never looking down. When Linda coughs it sounds like a nineteenth century tuberculosis asylum, clearing, clearing, clearing. Now she is howling again like a wolf outside a cabin in the forest -- fire burning and safe and cozy inside. These sounds are terrifying and it reminds me of that 1950's horror movie where the scientists are inside a kind of metal igloo and the abominable snowman is outside in the arctic cold.

I don't know any of the people here. I can't see Kerthy except for her red hood. I can only see Linda's back, draped in lace, and one of her feet in a yellow sock. This would be a good chakra from which to write my valentines. Too bad I already finished. Luke -- this passing thought is for you -- great sex last night, hope I don't bleed all over myself up here -- I am your mushy bloody-hearted valentine. If they autopsy me they'll find a combo heart/uterus organ, my mythical organ, sacred heart of uterus. My babies came from in there -- that's why I don't want a hysterectomy, ever. The pace calmed down now, stilled. Kerthy's talking about menstruation now, about her mother's repressed sexuality. Can't think who I should write to during this chakra -- probably this is the least subtle one.

4:45: Kerthy's been talking about people who prey on children sexually. I can't get comfortable, still feel kind of theatrical. I feel like adjusting my bra straps. It feels like I'm on a train or a transatlantic fight -- the way you feel like nobody's watching you, yet somebody could be. You will be known to the stewardess for an instant when she brings the drinks -- you can squirm all you want because you're unknown to everyone so it doesn't make any difference, but it's possible someone could be looking at you at any given minute. Maybe you sense a glance directed at you, or did you imagine it, or did you wish for it because you're bored?

Linda was making an apelike noise, like gorillas beating their chests and it got real intense for a while. Now more of the feral sounds and the storm raging outside the cabin door. It must be hard to sound or talk or read for an hour. The noise level in here rises and falls, there's a dynamic. There's a correlation between what Linda and Ellen do, and sometimes it feels like the noises Linda makes are in response to the reader, like she's illustrating. Now the reader, Kerthy, is so quiet I think the microphone went out, or else she's just radically changing her sound level in contrast to Linda and Ellen. If the microphone is broken, I guess I need to try to fix it when I go down there in ten minutes -- or will Ellen? I have no idea what Linda would want done. Now Kerthy sounds like someone talking on the telephone in another room and you don't know if you should listen any more. When it's amplified, you know you have permission. The loss of the mike is melodramatic -- makes me feel like an unwilling voyeur -- very tense about what Linda would want me to do about it. I have no idea, hope Ellen will come out and do something. Any second the alarm will go off and we will see what ...

Chakra 2: Security Orange Pelvis

5:30: The microphone was broken. Linda had to stop the meditation and give us instructions about incense and lights. I feel guilty I couldn't psychically figure out what to do. Ellen had to do additional sound checks and it was disruptive. The reader, Steve, is talking about money and so I decided to clean out my purse and balance my check book. Not feeling anything now, really, like an airplane or bus ride, like getting started on a journey and being disrupted by road construction or the car breaking down. Again, the telephone line and power line analogy. Why do I feel like I'm on a train -- the sound? I can feel motion, vibration, through the platform and chair. This hour is really going slower. Stress about the breakdown of equipment, inability to intuit what Linda wanted and not knowing how to do what she asked. Also this chakra is money and security, obviously where a lot of my issues are. I can't get comfortable during this one; I was sneezing and my butt hurts even though this chair is great. I'm not feeling this chakra like the first. It's not as hypnotic. The reader is some kind of professional actor/writer, where as Kerthy was way more a real person "just talking" after the first few warm-up minutes. Seems like he prepared all of it, like a stand-up comedian, not like it's just moving through him. Now there is a nice hypnotic hum going on from Linda and the long-string instrument. For a few seconds it was like a hive, buzzing like flies or bees. Linda is doing things with her breath. Reader is saying the smell of green apples alleviates stress in men and I think of Luke; he buys green apples at the grocery store. Linda is hot now, riding a wave, surfing on top of the musical tones, like jazz on a long train ride. All the delay just dropped out and now it's really quiet, except for the reader's words. He has ten minutes left, he seems to be changing gears. I like this pen, I am acutely aware of the sound it makes, scratching against the paper, percussive to me -- no one else can hear it. Ellen is changing to a different register of the instrument -- more treble. Sounds like a harmonica now. The "music" is really beautiful at this moment, the combination of Linda's vocalizing and the strings.

Chakra 3: Courage Yellow Solar Plexus

6:30: Scott is the reader, talking about how people say he's courageous because he is living with AIDS, about how he feels fear and how he wants people to remember his body in face of the profound physical changes the illness may (will, his word) eventually bring. Talking about his show Tuesday and introducing a female alter-ego who is shameless. He said hard in describing this feminine persona. "Don't leave, don't leave," he says at intervals. When Scott did a performance with us for Minimum Wage two years ago it seemed at the end of the piece he was saying bye-bye, with a childlike hand gesture, receding into darkness. I did so much crying about Scott's death the afternoon of that dress rehearsal, in some ways I feel that I am already cried out. If he dies of AIDS, is he leaving us, or are we leaving him? He says he views death as a challenge, a change of venue. He's asked us not to look at him now. I was running my fingers through my hair, trying to detangle it; seems to be a movement that has something to do with the long-string instrument. He says he's afraid, he wants to walk out the back door. He says he's not sure how safe he feels, how much he trusts the audience. This is pretty tough. Lots of spaces between the words now, hard work moving through fear. He says just the affirmation that he feels fear makes the door swing open on it.

6:45: Dark outside now. Linda is panting. Now she is screaming, really drowning out Scott's talking. Ellen is making a Sergio Leone lost guitar sound down low on the strings. Scott says he wants to swear, he feels angry. Maybe it's the Clint Eastwood movie sounds -- he says he feels helpless. Should he tell ghost stories now? Sounds seem to be coming from the wall behind us, Mexican guitars in the storage area I know is hidden behind that door, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly -- feels like the close-up sequences when Sergio Leone shows the slits of the gunfighter's eyes. Scott says he is afraid of the audience's gaze and wishes we wouldn't listen to him either. I am hungry now. Should I eat potato chips, or will Scott feel it's disrespectful? If I just did what I needed to take care of myself, I would eat them. People will think I am just white trash and totally out of it, like a big ol' Anna Nicole Smith.

Chakra 4: Compassion Green Chest

Luke, I'm writing to you from within Linda's meditation. Do you think I'm hard-hearted? Do you think I'm heartless? Everyone else seems to think I'm tender-hearted, but you probably know better. I have been heart-sick and heart-broken both because of my love for you. This happened years ago. Do you really understand that you broke my heart? Maybe we shouldn't be together after that tragedy happened? What becomes of the broken-hearted? Nothing special. You just live until it's time for you to die someday.

You will always be a very important person in my life because you broke my heart. You are the last I will ever allow to do that. I continued to love you past the heartbreak, but everything was changed. We have a lot of memories, both you and I and us together. All the hurt and trauma wiped out a lot, like boxes of irreplaceable photographs kept in an unsafe place, like that book of our wedding photos you let get ruined.

I had a terrible dream. Linda says I need to talk to you about it. My problem is, I feel that you haven't taken very good care of my love. I feel angry, just like I do when Anastasia leaves the hard-earned money clothes I buy for her lying crumpled on the bedroom floor where they get lost and dirty and trashed. I feel that, when we met, because you did not know me very well, you did not understand the value of my love, the purity, the intensity, that it was diamonds, not cubic zirconia. And eventually, because you were young, you left my love out in the weather, didn't take care of it, and it was damaged, rained-on, trashed (Annie) and your moving out of the Harris Avenue house when Anastasia was a baby.

What I have had since that time is a broken heart. The scar tissue, glue, whatever it was that put it all back together, is what makes my heart seem so hard to you now. It's not still broken, it's mended, repaired. My heart is just not any more made of one intact piece. It's no longer a single, intact unit, pure, in its original state. I feel I have not been taken care of, that I have been left mostly to fend for myself and have grown wild, not tame.

This chakra is green, compassion, and it seems to be releasing the most stuff in me so far. I feel terrible that I cannot be a silent martyr. I know what you want and need and it is usually within my power to give it to you. But because I feel that you have not taken care of my love properly, I won't, because the inequity of the situation would then be so vast. If I did that, I would have to be dishonest, to act like I was just living to give to others without any return, like a saint, when that isn't my true impulse. I just always wanted an equal romantic relationship. I have to keep my heart so closed, so shielded now, for my own survival.

Beverly is talking about what you have to do to keep your heart healthy. Where was I up to now and how did we suddenly get here? She is talking about weight loss and post-menopausal women. This is getting a little too pragmatic for me.

7:45: Over four hours into this meditation. I can definitely make it. It's not a problem being here. I don't need to pee and I am not even thinking about smoking. I guess I could read now. I have more than enough to do. I could definitely just sit here the whole time, with nothing to do, no water or writing. It is doing enough just to be here.

Chakra 5: Communication Blue Throat

8:20: Danielle is French and this is the most hypnotic section so far. Her words are usually incomprehensible to me, but then a random word will cross my airspace that I understand -- like free association. It's very beautiful, just the cadence of her language. Ellen was playing on a section of strings that sounded to me like an accordion. Maybe I'm hallucinating now, who knows, just the combination of French words and the melodic tones. I have so much respect for both Linda and Ellen. I don't know how they can go at it physically and spiritually, non-stop, with such energy, for seven hours.

I see someone I know, finally, after 8 p.m. I ate potato chips for a while during the third chakra and now I'm hungry again for real. I don't feel a real need to pee, and I don't seem to be bleeding all over myself. Linda really seems to have established a groove; Ellen, too. They are into a seamless rhythm now, barely interrupted by changes in readers. I hope Linda is content with the lights and that everything is non-disruptive for the duration. I felt so bad about the microphone breaking. Hope the lights are now the way she wanted them.

Sometimes, for a moment, I think Danielle is reading in English because I understand every word. But as soon as I formulate that thought, she's speaking in French again. Like when you dream you are falling and when you think of it, the thought jerks you awake. The French is moving me faster on this journey. It feels like when you are on the Paris metro going from one end of the line to the other at night, underground; you pull into many different stations, but you don't get off.

Chakra 6: Intuition Purple Forehead

9:20: The reader was nearly ten minutes late! I can't believe it. I was so angry I didn't know what to do, felt it was a terrible disrespect to the work Linda was doing. She is a young, beautiful Hispanic woman and she clicked her heels all the way over to the microphone like a flamenco dancer when she finally arrived, put her car keys down noisily, totally casual, like she was at a poetry spew in some smoke-filled bar. I wanted to deck her. Where did Linda find this woman? Unless I am sadly mistaken, this woman is reading off a list of food items in Spanish. I am sure she said tortillas, manteca, leche, bolitos. For all I know, she's reading a menu from a Mexican restaurant -- that's how mad I am! It seems painful to be here now. My anger is making me totally uninterested in this reader. I'm not nervous or anything at all now. Starting to want to go home and smoke and eat something. I don't think Linda is in the same trance-like space she was earlier -- probably she was conscious of the reader's absence and that may have brought her down to a more earthly space. Actually, she had said that after 9 p.m. she might be in the guru mode, so maybe that was the lesson of this reader being late, to create a conflict. I would be so angry, if it were me. I'd demand some kind of explanation, but really, there isn't one. What a dis. I asked Linda for some kind of contingency plan and she didn't give me one, said it wouldn't happen. I had an intuition something like this could happen, and this was the one reader unknown to me. I'm getting irritable. Only twenty more minutes, and then Alton, who has been here the whole time. Linda must be wiped out -- I cannot imagine where she is the day after these vocal feats and spiritual expenditures. I would definitely sleep all day the next day. Won't her throat be sore? The reader is getting quieter and quieter. I am not getting anything out of this chakra, except anger and frustration. Ellen came and stood by the staircase for a few minutes. She must be very tired from walking along the instrument. Aren't her fingertips sore? Linda's sound is much quieter on this reader -- more sporadic -- more silences between passages. Ellen now seems to be resetting the computer. Linda is doing high-pitched, almost silent screaming. I wonder if that helps clear? If so, I did a lot of that work as a girl growing up. God, I would love to go to sleep now. Fifteen minutes left of this reader. I am going to set the alarm and maybe I'll close my eyes.

Chakra 7: Joy White Top of Head

The next day. I didn't write at all during the last chakra. When I blew the whistle and came down, the reader, Angeles, who had been late in the first place, wouldn't stop. She turned her panther eyes on me but it had no effect. I touched her arm, and still she wouldn't stop, so I stood very, very close to her and stared at her and then said, "Thank you," once again. Alton had been there all day, and I couldn't believe she was going to go over after she had been late in the first place. But when Alton wafted in, all in white, he immediately seemed to take it all to another place. The last thing I remember is him talking about getting ice cream as a child, childhood memories of his grandmother. Then I was somewhere else, somewhere between waking and sleeping, not needing to pee or eat or smoke, and I just stayed there the whole hour. I was actually surprised that I got back to a hypnotic space after the disruption of the late reader and my anger. I had set the alarm, and I needed it to remind me the time was up at 11. During the last hour I had that feeling you get when you masturbate for a long time without stopping, alternately numbed out, but flipping over to extreme sensitivity and rawness every few minutes; that feeling that you can't possibly come again, but then you somehow recharge and the next orgasm almost startles you. That's very much the place I felt I was in during the last hour, and also I experienced a visual sensation like everything was haloed in white light, like when you are sleep-deprived or have been concentrating very hard for a long time on some pains-taking mechanical task.

When I helped Ellen take Linda down from the platform, Linda suddenly turned into Bisma from Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits for me. I had the impulse to get down on my hands and knees to help her into her shoes, like a religious devotee. Linda seemed weak and light and frail. I felt absolutely drunk once the performance was over, and I was even slurring my speech when I tried to speak to Linda or the others. That was the wildest sensation of the entire seven hours, and one I was not prepared for. I was actually afraid to get into my car and drive, for fear I would get stopped for drunk driving and be unable to explain.

The next day I was absolutely euphoric, feeling I had been blessed to be in the position I had been in during those seven hours. It was a great challenge for me not to do the easiest thing, which would have been just to be theatrical, to switch into drag queen mode. It was much, much harder just to be there, to fight my own impulse to perform. I felt I learned something about being an active watcher, something I always try very hard to do and put a lot of energy into, because it's something I believe in so much. I felt like I was a scapegoat or surrogate for the audience members, a symbol of them. I learned so much although it is difficult to put what I learned into words. I have such an abiding respect and devotion for Linda and Ellen and their work.

ARTIST'S BOOKS

2009-06-30T11:29:00.000-05:00

Marie-Antoinette (2006)

2009-06-26T23:44:00.000-05:00

An homage inspired by Sofia Coppala's 2006 film by the same name. Although I have always been interested in Marie-Antoinette, and the guillotine.

Fabric, commercial scrap-booking paper, commercial stationery, magazine pictures, color photocopies, ribbon.

Fifty: The Story of My Life (2004)

2009-06-26T23:43:00.000-05:00

1954
December 14 I am born
with the mark of Cain and a piece of
glass in my arm
bundle sticks and bind them
with grass or wild rye
collect rocks
draw on the sidewalk with chalk
act out stories
with my grandmother, Mimi
fear tornadoes
swing
play dress-up and have
tea parties with my dolls
watch Captain Kangaroo
on television
go to church
spend Saturday mornings
with my father
at the hardware store
covet tiny plastic objects
at the dime store
and in gum ball machines
Blue Northers, dust storms
the carbon black plant
my father's photographs
tell stories of Germany.
Cherry, Flopsy, Teensy Lou, Ouiga
and my rooster
bury dolls and treasures
in the back yard
dig them up later
climb trees
fear window peepers
and insane escaped convicts
blow soap bubbles
with a wooden spool
Mother reads Heidi to me
Childcraft books
Daddy recites
Edgar Allan Poe poems to me
at bedtime sometimes
the public library
Daddy wants to sail to the Galapagos
and I am afraid
he will leave us behind
draw pictures
learn to read
learn to write
fall in love with Elvis
the Li'l Abner comic strip
learn to shoot bottles
with my father's rifle at the
city dump
learn to swim, not drown
kindergarten
aspire to join the circus
as a trapeze artist
Mother and Mimi sew my pretty dresses
dawning understanding of class,
socioeconomic status, race
religious precocity coupled with
deep existentialist doubt
admiration of movie showgirls
write and illustrate stories
Psycho
piano lessons
my sister's birth
chicken pox
learn to ride a bicycle
break my nose
in a playground accident
Daddy dies in a car wreck
1964
my blue transistor radio
scary crank phone calls
dear diary
mother goes back to college
measles
glasses
braces
draw pictures
The Addams Family on television
the Beatles
leave Borger
tonsillectomy
become the new girl at school
Motown music
my troubles with math begin
early puberty brings breasts,
bad skin and other problems
ghosts and poltergeists
the high dive at the
public swimming pool
Jane Eyre
choir
Ouija boards and seances
The Sound of Music
Western Auto guitar
The Diary of Anne Frank
Tennessee Williams plays
Vogue magazine
make-up, high heels, stockings
anorexia
become the new girl again
get ears pierced
ballet class
Degas
community theatre
debate and drama at school
write poetry
research the silent movies to the point of
obsession
haunt antique shops
junior high misfit persecution
read the Encyclopedia at lunch
Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet
quit attending church
quit ballet and piano lessons
teach myself Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata
Satie's Gymnopédies, Chopin études and
nocturnes
first boyfriend
fascination with gypsies
The Great Gatsby
my high school integrated
by the National Guard
become friends with Karen and
Michael
become a member of the
band of outsiders at school
research F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,
Sarah Bernhardt and Isadora Duncan
write letters to Lillian Gish
get replies
high school theatre
thrift store shopping
repeated violations of
school dress code
study French
accused of witchcraft and levitation
the Rolling Stones
Nabokov
Flannery O'Connor
near-death drowning experience
The Little Prince
Bonnie and Clyde
Cabaret
aspire to a career on the stage
and to move to Paris
Mother says I am a romantic
learn to type at Mother's
insistence
Viet Nam War continues
classmates are drafted
early graduation
leave Abilene for college
see the ocean for the first time
Roe v. Wade ends friends'
backstreet abortions
lose my faith
work an inventory of bad jobs
especially in offices and bars
first readings of philosophy
and feminism
Anaïs Nin's journals
drop out of college
move to Santa Fe
letter and journal writing
1974
first marriage
brief return to college
become friends with Donna
first tattoo on 21st birthday
become friends with Silvetta
cats Mick and Bianca
divorce
change name
disco contests, disco lifestyle
model
more ear piercings
photography
become friends with Bae
introduction to foreign movies while
working as a projectionist at an art house
paint murals
French and Russian novels
usher for opera
get a compliment from
Greer Garson
get assaulted in my own home
aspire to write
remarry first husband
pregnancy
read lots of books about
child development
read Levi-Strauss
birth of Nicholas
breastfeeding
learning to be a mother
move back to Texas
dawning realization of the challenges of
balancing motherhood and artistic pursuits
start smoking
divorce
marry second husband at Cadillac Ranch
move to Austin
go to work for UT
Dia de los Muertos imagery resonates
custody battle with first husband over Nicholas
pregnancy
birth of Natasha by c-section
1984
crime novels and film noir, Hitchcock
sleep deprivation
stress
breast-feeding
mothering, mothering, mothering
death of Mimi
take children to see the ocean for the first time
at Galveston
second husband departs
become a redhead
return to college
cat Minette
discover lithography and performance art
get burglarized repeatedly
teach myself to play accordion
meet Suze
study with and work for Carolee Schneemann
second husband returns
graduate from college
continue to work for UT
Hard Women and performing
mothering, mothering, mothering
performing
dogs Frida and Diego
collaborations with
Linda Montano
weather childrens' puberties
attempt to balance work, mothering, art
art always gets the short shrift
write memoirs at forty
New Orleans
Tuscany, Milan, Rome, Venice, Paris
start making artist's books
Minette's death
depression
Jungian therapy
vampires are glamorous
become friends with Shane
meet Pina Bausch
Nicholas goes out on his own
insomnia
research Voodoo
start making dolls
second husband departs
difficulty sleeping in a bed
divorce
Voodoo vévé tattoo
Natasha graduates from high school
"roots" trip with Natasha to the Panhandle
and Santa Fe
Natasha starts college
honky-tonking often feels like
going to church ought to
swallows and Carmen libretto tattoo
nose piercing
stabbed heart tattoo
Frida loses an eye
return to original hair color
anemia
big job
Diego's death
2004
Dublin, London
Milan, Venice, Vienna
I have a great time wherever I go
Frida's death
female trouble
dog Buster

At fifty, I am the sum total of all this.
Like a snail, I carry my house
of experiences and passions with me.
This inventory has been an interesting
exercise in selecting landmarks.
My life has been molded mostly by my
interactions with the people and animals
I have loved, a strong impulse to make art and
my response to the art others have made.
I have already lived much longer than I
thought I would when I was young.
My childhood seems more tangible to me
than the decades that came afterward.
I have had thirty-two addresses
that I can now recall.
In fifty years I have managed to overcome
my fear of abandonment
but I am still no good at math.
The days are whizzing by now;
time accelerates.
Thank you for crossing paths
with me on my journey.

Heartbreak Book (2000)

2009-06-26T23:42:00.001-05:00

The Divorce Book (2000)

2009-06-26T23:42:00.000-05:00

Front cover detail and back cover.

Free Souvenir of Las Vegas (1994)

2009-06-26T23:41:00.000-05:00

Book fabricated from pages of pamphlets and brochures found in Las Vegas, business cards from sex industry workers and color photocopies of my own photographs inside casinos. Vellum overlay pages with writing give a kind of "prophylactic" feel to some pages.

Snapshots from the Landlocked Land (1994)

2009-06-26T23:40:00.001-05:00

In which The Borger Stories and The Abilene Stories were originally contained.

Little Red Art/Life Manifesto (1993)

2009-06-26T13:42:00.001-05:00

(Click to enlarge)

Rachel Fashion Beauty Dolls (1993)

2009-06-26T12:55:00.002-05:00

Photographs of me by Ellen Felsenthal, photo collages using magazine pages, hand-coloring and color photocopies.

Mother and Child (1986)

2009-06-26T12:52:00.000-05:00

A suite of Madonnas, pen and ink, 8 x 10" panels.

TRAVELOGUES

2009-06-26T12:02:00.002-05:00

Hundreds of photographs made during these trips and many sketchbook pages are available for viewing at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/diebuechsepics/

Siracusa (Ortigia), Sicily (May/June 2008)

2009-06-25T23:47:00.004-05:00

Sicily!

Everything went fine getting from my hotel to Victoria Station to Gatwick. Squalling kid next to me on the two hour flight. Striking blue-eyed older man, my driver, there to meet me with a sign. One hour drive from Catania: first through a terrain that looked much like Texas, and I got momentarily depressed. Looks a little like Mexico, but better kept. Love to see the ancient, deserted Italian farmhouses and I want to stop and explore them. Olive trees, orange trees, vineyards everywhere!

To hotel, a tiny cute one, and after some grappling with the tiny lift, to the desk where nice Frederick holds forth. Maybe a dozen rooms here at this small hotel on the marina?

Siracusa: definitely still Italy in its architecture, but maybe a bit more Spanish/Moorish. But the ocean is near and Siracusa sits on a natural harbor -- no beach -- marina with fishing boats and yachts. The waterfront seems to pander to families: rides for children, toys, balloons, ice cream for sale.

I was afraid to wander too far until I got my bearings, but made it to the Duomo where a wedding was ending. Grabbed a seat at the café across the way to watch. First impressions: bridal party gaudy, prom-like dresses with lots of sparkles, black, red. Again, rather like Mexico. Women are pretty stocky and short here -- nothing like the elegant Lombards of northern Italy. No one seems very dressed up -- the shopkeepers, at least. It feels very relaxed here, very Southern. Loads and loads of English and Germans "on holiday." Frederick indicates the ancient drama festival brings many people here this time of year. Tomorrow and the next day are Sicilian Independence holidays. Makes me think of The Leopard. Narrow, winding streets, blackened, blasted crumbling architecture -- very picturesque. And always, the ocean visible at the light end of the dark, winding streets. Many of the older women I saw at the wedding actually looked like drag queens doing Elizabeth Taylor. Lots of red and black dyed hair. A little too-protracted eye contact and cruising by some of the local men, but nothing like what I used to experience in Italy when I was younger.

So far, a huge price relief from London. E3 buys Campari and soda and a plate of cute finger sandwiches, olives and pistachios. Love that about Italy in the late afternoon.

Plan to crash soon and get up early. Wow! Sunday morning in Sicily! I'll go loiter outside the church and people watch. The tap water here is salty. I can't get soap to lather. Just went outside to rooftop terrace: everyone headed over the bridge into Ortigia on foot and motorcycles for Saturday night.

+ + + + + + +

I set the alarm and got up early. I was the first in the hotel for breakfast, served outside on the rooftop terrace by a dark guy with crazy bedhead, sleepy eyes, gold teeth and bracelet. Charming spread of local breads and pastries and fruit. But I swear it's nearly impossible to get sufficient quantities of the excellent coffee of Europe. One cup and you're cut off. They never offer a second. Then out for a long walk before anyone but ancient men and their little dogs were out. It starts off cool but shows signs of becoming a real scorcher later. Narrow streets, more like alleys, I look up to see incredible balconies full of cactus, bougainvillea, geraniums. I always love to see the ghostly, deserted apartments and flats in the midst of the occupied ones. You young men tearing down alleys on motorcycles without helmets pose a threat to life! Had a second cup of coffee across from the Duomo after a couple of hours, assuming I'd get to see families going in. No: just a few old ladies inside. Relic of someone in a side chapel. Lovely, cool and quiet church. Took an alley into a nearby courtyard, discovered a glass case containing a Cinderella coach, just like in Renoir's film The Golden Coach. Strolled the labyrinth that is Ortigia window-gazing: lots of coral jewelry, some of it really lovely and expensive. I wish I could buy an Italian fan; saw some pretty ones in a perfumer's window. Colorful ceramics here in Sicily, like Talavera. Seems to be a local folk craft. And Sicilian horse cart miniatures with pom-pom decorations. Walked all the way to what I was told was the local swimming spot, but too many loud young men there for me. Passed a lively fish market.

Oh! There was a Sicilian puppet museum I toured. Cool papier maché marionettes about a yard tall, some with glass doll eyes. Not slick craftsmanship, very powerful. From what I could tell, this marionette theatre was the project of two guys starting about 1950. Followed signs to workshop, closed on Sunday. Cool painted canvas backdrops for the puppet plays: lots of knights, princesses, Turks or Ottomans, dragons. A high point.

Kept walking for three more hours. Saw a real-life Sicilian horse cart hired by a family for a tour. Poor horse. Hard to tell if it cares or not, pulling the cart over the cobblestones. Took off away from the Duomo, browsing the side street shop windows. Sunday lunch time: dishes clanking, voices alternately singing or arguing, tiny old ladies all in black standing in their doorways, shrines high up in the walls, laundry hanging off balconies and across streets, delicious cooking smells. I must admit these Sicilians don't look much different from Romans. There's certainly not the emphasis on bella figura here as elsewhere in Italy, though. People are dressed very casually, and men who are not tourists actually wear shorts here, and espadrilles or driving shoes. I saw several gekkos sunning themselves today, and some truly trampy looking women, too. I hope U.S. television isn't responsible. Went back to the Duomo about 1:00 p.m., passed well-dressed families in cafes by that time. By late afternoon, went back to hotel to take a cool shower and enjoyed a documentary on Marcello Mastroianni on television. Waiting now for my host to come pick me up for dinner.

The only things I've coveted but won't spend my costly Euros on is branch coral jewelry with silver settings. My hotel has branch coral painted around the room numbers -- charming.

Today was my host's son's first Communion. Saw little girls today in elaborate white dresses -- must have been the day for it. Thought for a moment a boy was hauling a huge religious icon on his back, but it turned out only to be a folding table.

+ + + + + + +

The skylight over my bed shows me a gray sky...it looks threateningly like rain today in sunny Sicily.

A nice dinner last night of fresh tuna and a ricotta/pistachio dessert at a bistro owned by one of my host's foodie friends -- which coincidentally I had noticed when I passed it earlier in the day.

Horrible, loud, crass group of American librarians are on the terrace for breakfast this morning. As always, I hate to be shaken out of my Dream Europe by the sounds of harsh American English. Siracusa really has its share of tourists -- a place like Santa Fe, I fear, with an economy dependent on tourism. William indicates there are few prospects for the youth of this sweet place, so they move away to the mainland after university.

If it rains I don't know what I will do today. Since it's a festa, the school decided to close and so I am on my own again until someone comes to fetch me for the Greek theatre this evening. I find I naturally walk away from the harbor here. The water and boats have limited appeal for me and no one is fishing, swimming or doing anything interesting in the marina. William indicates there are nearby beaches and fishing villages, but not here.

It really is dark and threatening. I guess I can always duck in one of the many churches and do some drawing today.

11:00 p.m.
I'm really tired, so this will be short. Another day of strolling around through a kind of dicey area where I saw a fully naked, fully grown man hammering away at something on his balcony. Nice salad at lunch facing the marina. Picked up to go to ancient Greek theatre. Incredible. Orestes/Agamemnon cycle. Fabulous staging, incredible harpies! Delivered back to hotel starving at 10 p.m. (no dinner) and went back out in search of a gellato. The locals here don't really come out until about this time, anyway. Stumbled on an incredible orchestra concert taking place on the steps of the Duomo to celebrate Italian Independence Day. Sat in cafe opposite, not believing my good fortune to be there that night. They played, and I am not kidding, along with selections from Cavalleria Rusticana and Carmen, a Moriccone medley. And, yes: they really did end with the theme from The Godfather!

+ + + + + + +

My last day in Siracusa was a very long, wonderful one. Spent the day at the study center, saw the catacombs, student apartments, met all the faculty and staff, strolled a little more, had several coffees, returned to hotel exhausted to take a quick shower and nap while waiting for the late dinner Lucia and William arranged in my honor. Great dinner at nouvelle cuisine place, prosecco, great food, great conversation about Italian Neorealism cinema, cultural differences, Italian history, child-rearing, universities, Garibaldi and D’Annunzio.

Walked back one last time past the harbor, yacht lights twinkling in the distance. I should have drawn the moored boats, I guess, from the view from the hotel terrace. Saw a guy come off a boat -- I suppose he lives on it -- and saw his dog whine and yelp as his master walked away down the pier with his backpack. Lots of dogs on boats. Lots of cats hiding in the shade and eating the pasta people leave out for them.

Yesterday during a coffee at the Duomo, saw another wedding. The couple were both in their late fifties and it was certainly neither's first trip to the altar. Surprisingly, no children or grandchildren were there as witnesses. The bride's bouquet was artificial.

I really loved Siracusa, or more specifically, Ortigia. On the way to the Catania airport I saw from the car window wonderful beaches and seaside hotels and villas -- about half an hour's drive from Siracusa.

London (May 2008)

2009-06-25T23:46:00.007-05:00

Jumped onto a double-decker bus to St. Paul's. The bus route took us down Fleet Street, which was wonderful. Architectural details in London really are great. So many renovations going on everywhere, and I always wish I could go inside and see the remaining old bathrooms and light fixtures before the spaces are completely gutted. We were to meet the St. Paul's choir director at 4:00 p.m., so we had time for a nice tea beforehand.

Then on to private, closed choir rehearsal -- truly unbelievable to have access to such a thing! It was the little boys first at rehearsal -- I suppose they range in age from six to puberty? They rehearse twice a day, at 8 a.m. and again at 4 p.m. All live on the premises of St. Paul's at a boarding school. Who knew? But it makes perfect sense with the intensity of musicianship required. And they all study three instruments as well as sing. The professional grown-up singers arrive at 5:00, throwing off their business suitcoats and hurrying into their robes. The day's rehearsal was of Psalms 44, to be used at Evensong.

Then (and I didn't see it coming at all!) we were ushered in the back way into "stage seats" for that night's Evensong. Remember, this is St. Paul's, and our group was seated in the front row of the choristery, where the Royal Family sat during Charles and Diana's wedding. The priests were right beside us, and publicly welcomed our student group to the service at its beginning.

I noticed one little choirboy waiting in the choir for the others to enter at the service's beginning and wondered why. At the service's end, I saw he was on crutches with metal leg braces. The boys wear the white neck ruff, black cossacks and white robes that seem to date back hundreds of years. The most junior boys, who must only be five or six years old, wear only the black cossack and sit out the special song. It's unbelievable to me that such young boys can read music and that they have such perfect pitch. They are prodigies, and they do sound like angels.

I found myself inexplicably moved to tears during Evensong. Just being in St. Paul's -- in that pew, with those angelic voices -- caused the tears to well up. I always seem to time-travel in churches, thinking of hundreds of years of illiterate humans coming into the splendor from their harsh everyday existences. The text was something from Job -- about mortality and trying to do Good but Evil always being at hand. The most striking feature of the service was a prayer of protection for the night to come against evil-doers in the darkness! I was instantly transported mentally to pre-electricity days and a London created by Dickens, or one where Jack the Ripper and Sweeney Todd dwell. Then the priests passed little red velvet purses made in the shapes of sacred hearts for the collection.

Anyway, quite unexpectedly a crazy, moving day for me at St. Paul's. I wouldn't have predicted I'd be so moved. Wonder why the boys choir tradition continues now that there's no prohibition of females "performing" in public? The sexism worries me a little, but I need to learn more about the tradition before making a judgment. Of course, all of it -- the church ritual -- is alien to me, yet strangely affecting. The historical part of being there was not lost on me. The organist finished the service with a macabre Saint-Saens piece.

I'll never forget the voices of those boys and the difficult, angular melodies -- almost Medieval.

Souvenir of Santa Fe (August, 2007)

2009-06-25T23:43:00.000-05:00

I.
Albuquerque airport: syringe disposal (full!) in the women’s restroom. I always forget about heroin and northern New Mexico. Shuttle to Santa Fe -- heart-tugs as familiar terrain appears. My old friend arrives to fetch me. She is little changed in thirty years. The plaza and its landmarks and architecture -- the rounded-off corners, the mud-colored walls, the vigas, the turquoise painted door and window facings -- hurt my heart. How I have missed it! I remember being nineteen years old once here, and in love -- as huge snowflakes fell, like objects cut out of white paper. Hollyhocks everywhere -- how could I have forgotten them? I walk the sidewalks and alleys of my youth and am struck by how much remains, still, in my kinetic memory. My feet know funny things like when to change sides of the street, due to missing sidewalks. The familiar smell of some plant -- what? -- inextricably associated for me with Santa Fe floods my senses. We sit and have a coffee in the French bakery in the ground floor of hotel La Fonda, unchanged in three decades. Its enigmatic nichos are empty, still. I buy film in the camera store where I once bought my first good camera on layaway. I walk through and browse the silver and turquoise jewelry for sale on blankets under the portal of the Palace of the Governor (when I was a child, the root beginnings of my lifelong longings to acquire souvenir objects). I find the balcony of the law firm where I used to work in Sena Plaza, home of a La Llorona. I walk up Palace Avenue past three of my old abodes (which look exactly the same as they ever did from the outside, although they now will sell for a million dollars). We grocery shop at Whole Foods, and then we go home to my friend’s house, previously inhabited by the actor Alan Arkin, at the far end of upper Canyon Road, right next to where Tom Ford of Gucci is building a mansion. At twilight, my friend, her boyfriend and her dog and I take a long walk.

II.
We walk from its base all the way up Canyon Road, with me remembering all the way, to a cafe for coffee. Then I enjoy a relaxing pedicure arranged by my friend at her regular nail salon -- her stylist, an Española girl, sporting inches-long hot-pink talons and a recent motorcycle injury. I loved the women’s culture of the place, like a harem -- the members of a wedding party all have their nails done, small, well-behaved children wait on their mothers, someone comes in to sell tamales while I half-doze, waiting for my friend. I walk some more through my old neighborhoods, gazing down alleys and up at windows, remembering where old friends once lived, while my friend checks in at her work. At nine, to Maria’s for a late dinner and a lethally strong margarita, hearing about how my hosts had run into Robert Redford in the parking lot last time they ate there.

III.
Early morning: the farmer’s market with my friend so she can buy her weekly produce, then to the post office downtown and past my other old abode, the place I lived with his father when baby Nicholas was born. Then, to the Tesuque flea market out by the opera: good junk, good rugs, good tile. I could spend a lot of money there. Huge blue sky and puffy white clouds. Then, to browse an arts and crafts fair on the Plaza. My friend makes us a lovely, light early dinner. We spend an hour getting ready for the opera. We drive the dangerous backroad way past El Nido through Tesuque. When we arrive at the opera, tailgate parties are taking place in the parking lot. Elegant, dressed up people sip champagne and enjoy picnics and cold dinners before curtain. Most people who go to the opera are very old, I realize.

La Bohème: my first opera ever, as a child, and still one of my favorites. Lightning strikes in the distance during Act II. Negatively charged ions in the air smell great. Incredible production, beautifully realized and performed, and I sniffle through Act IV. It is so romantic, so sad. It strikes me as ironic: my running off to live in poverty in Santa Fe in my own youth was my very own attempt to live La Vie de Bohème, when I think about it. And here I sit, in middle age, at the operatic version. Life imitates art. It rains on us all the drive home, and I have to help my friend navigate. We are growing old, and our night vision is no longer what it was once.

IV.
Long, gorgeous drive out to Chimayo with my hosts for brunch. Afterward, I convince them to drop me off at the Folk Art Museum so they can have some time alone together. I spend a couple of hours there, getting inspired by all the toys and installations. Too bad I have forgotten to pack a sketchbook. I meant to draw. I decide to hoof it from Museum Hill back downtown so my friend can have some time alone without having to come back to pick me up. Pass by my great-aunt’s former house. How is it I can still navigate to the locations of my childhood? Walk back to the plaza past Kaune’s grocery store and the Pink Adobe, frequent settings of my youth. Have a double cappucino and rest my feet for a few moments at a downtown cafe. Hoof it all the way up Palace and Upper Canyon Road to my friend’s house. I like walking alone, memories flashing into my consciousness in a cinematic way. When I walk, I think, and that’s not always good because I quickly become melancholy. I’m starting to get homesick and a little vulnerable now, missing my children and my dog. Thank God I go home tomorrow, I think to myself. I arrive at the home of my host at sunset. My friend cannot believe I have walked two hours (especially uphill and in leopard shoes), but I’ve enjoyed it. We go to a chic place downtown for drinks and appetizers. It’s stylish and mostly deserted on a Sunday evening. I sip my kir royale and admire the shoes of a woman who’s just entered. Then I realize it’s Diane Keaton, who’s just arrived with Val Kilmer.

We go home, I pack for my 6 a.m. shuttle departure to the Albuquerque airport the next morning, and I call it a day. I hear coyotes whiffling outside my window in the night; I half-awake to find the hairs on my arm and the back of my neck standing on end. Nature is close here -- not like in Austin.

Afterthoughts.

I love Santa Fe, but it always makes me sad. I was lucky to have actually lived there in the Seventies, I think; it's like the American version of having lived in Paris in one's youth. I love the architecture, love the mountains and landscapes and sky views, but hate the tourists. I always seem to fall in love with these impossible places where the economy is based on tourism. I hate the high cost of living and the moneyed retirees and those rich Texans who own second or vacation homes there. But if I won the lottery, I’d definitely buy a second home in Santa Fe; what a hypocrite I am! I hate the casinos; this new development cannot possibly be healthy for the indigenous folks on the reservations that house them. Hate the Santa Fe “art” scene. It’s good I left when I did, in 1980. Everything that was beginning to annoy me then has only magnified -- exponentially -- since then.

Santa Fe's just not a livable place for anyone who has to work and earn an honest living. Perhaps it never really was. But it’s one of those impractical places that will always call out to me (like Venice and New Orleans do) because I am, myself, impractical. So those places are just the logical settings for me, I guess. They appeal to my imagination.

Paris, Amsterdam (May-June 2006)

2009-06-25T23:42:00.002-05:00

College graduation trip with my daughter.

This story is called les ampoules de Paris, or, The Blisters of Paris.

FRIDAY, MAY 26, 2006

Where to begin? With Natasha along, I have no need to journal as I go. I see now, when I travel alone, it's necessary for me to journal, to retain my own sanity, because I speak to no one conversationally. I speak mainly just the mere "service" pleasantries and requests. Traveling alone, I might as well be mute.

With Natasha along, there's someone to share every discovery and observation. There's someone to point to things for, someone to laugh with. This has so seldom been the case in my previous travels.

So, I'll try to back-track. Flight over: nothing to report; smooth sailing, no delays. Detroit airport is cool -- Motown shop, smoking allowed in a sports bar and a very nice sushi restaurant where we had a late lunch before departure. Individual movies-on-demand on the flight over. I tried fitfully to watch the new Casanova, but wasn't in the mood. Natasha watched the King Kong remake, and Woody Allen's Matchpoint, which I'd already seen. Into Amsterdam Schiphol, no problem. One hour between flights -- just enough time for Natasha to eat a sandwich and we had coffee. Then on to Paris Charles de Gaulle -- quick 45-minute flight. We found a restroom to wash up a bit, then to the taxi stand. Nice Basque driver who had actually been in Austin in 1973. And, on the radio, I swear to God, the sound track from a Monsieur Hûlot Jacques Tati movie played. Great, cinematic taxi ride: first, the graffiti'd housing projects outside the Périphérique, then tall industrial and office buildings, then the first glimpses of nice apartment neighborhoods, then, the first breath-taking glimpse of Sacre Coeur, then everything speeds up. So much to look at: pedestrians, motorcycles, designer shops as you hit Opèra. Boum! La Concorde with its black, gold and verdigris statues -- obelisk -- Tuileries -- Louvre. Then we're on Quai Voltaire and at the hotel. Euro 48 cab ride.

Great news: the hotel clerk says our room is nearly ready and in ten minutes we are riding up the ancient, creaky two-person ascenseur to the top floor and Room 54, exactly as pictured and described. It's next to rooms once occupied by Wagner and Baudelaire, but has no ghost, the desk clerk informs us. A sweet little room, white, with paisley curtains on a green ground covering floor to ceiling French windows that open up on grille-work and a view of the Seine, the Louvre, the bridge (Pont des Artistes) and the bocquanistes' stalls.

The bateaux mouches tour incessantly on the Seine and the traffic is crazy out front of the hotel, but I find the sounds strangely restful once I crash into bed at night. It stays fully light until after 10:00 p.m., and it's fully light again by 6:00 a.m. I swear, Paris gets more sunlight hours than we do back in Austin. I'm envious. No wonder they eat at 9:00 p.m. And the shops close up by 7:00 p.m.

We left our bags in the hotel room and struck off. It's only just noon, so we go to a tabac and buy Gitanes avec filtres, then find a neighborhood brasserie for onion soup, plats du jour and coffee. Then down Rue du Bac (where D'Artagnon supposedly lived) to get Euro from the ATM in nearby St. Germain-des-Près, then window-shopping, then chic people-watching over another coffee at Les Deux Magots. There's a funny commemorative sign at the intersection in front of Les Deux Magots dedicated to Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. The Existentialist Corner. We continued to browse the neighborhood, got caught in a shower, and ducked into a wine store where we bought a fabulous Bordeaux 2000 for Euro 13. And a wine tool. Then we found a Provence fabric shop with beach bags, scarves and tablecloths, but, alas! It was Monday and the shop was closed. We wandered and wandered, making it a very long trek back to the hotel when we decided to return at 4:00. We took a nap until 7:00, roused ourselves, and went in search of dinner. We crossed to the Right Bank and, by chance, a flickering "pizza" sign drew us down a dark, narrow street. And what do we find across from the cafe? Vero-Dodat, one of the legendary 19th century passages I had planned to search out during our time in Paris. Lovely, melancholy, deserted except for one old woman painstakingly studying the menu outside the passage's one closed-Monday restaurant. Alas, the passage's shops are now mostly vacant. They have dark wood, mirror and glass facades. One shop sold espadrilles, and its stock was piled in neat towers in identical tan boxes. One now-deserted shop's facade had ghostly vestiges of signs advertising cartes des visites printed quickly -- probably left over from the Victorian era. Vero-Dodat was built in 1827. The atmosphere is much like the Brothers' Quay stop-action animated short film, Street of Crocodiles.

So, at dinner Natasha tried les escargots and grappled nobly with the snail-eating implements, and we shared a small pizza. We were the cafe's only customers, and French music played from somewhere -- Charles Aznavour, among others. We prowled the by-then closed shops in the arcades on Rivoli afterward, then, exhausted, collapsed into our clean white beds. We hadn't really slept for 48 hours.

Okay, so now comes the hard part and trying to remember what we did when. I will write some landmarks down, and then I will try to reconstruct which day we went where.

MONDAY:
Les Deux Magots and St. Germain-des-Près. Vero-Dodat, Rivoli.

TUESDAY:
I am crushed to learn La Samaritaine, my favorite Parisian department store with its Art Nouveau-tiled and curling ironwork interior, is closed indefinitely for conservation.

First metro ride: I see a ticker-tape sign in the station that says LES MYSTÈRES DE PARIS. This is astounding, only because my Parisian drawing series of last year has the same name!

Notre Dame, Cimitère Montmartre (we put cherries on the graves of our idols), Sacre Coeur, L'Apin Agile and the rest of Montmartre (where we found the Amelie grocery store), touristy Place de Terte (with big-eyed children postcards!), the Moulin Rouge, Pigalle, Bateau mouche ride at nightfall past the illuminated Eiffel Tower. At midnight, after the bateau mouche ride, we ate exquisite artisan cheeses, bread, pears and cherries we'd gotten earlier from street markets, and drank that bottle of Bordeaux in bed, hungry as hell and chilled to the bone.

Tuesday's main event was my thinking I had been pick-pocketed on the metro in Montmartre, only to later find I'd hidden my Euro from myself in another little purse in my main bag. Utterly bummed out, then ecstatic when I discovered my money. Lunch at a great little cafe at the foot of the hill! Kiki Monkey for my purse zipper!

Ah, attendez-vous un moment! I think Tuesday's the day the hotel caught on fire. I was in the bathtub about 4:00 p.m. shaving my legs as we took a mid-day break from walking. The fire alarm began to sound. We ignored it for about fifteen minutes, thinking it would stop, and we didn't smell anything burning or see smoke. Finally, I got out of the tub and called the front desk. Says I, "L'hotel, c'est en feu?" "Oui, Madame," replies the deadpan desk clerk. I began to rush around, wet and naked, trying to get the cash, credit cards and passports out of the room safe and into my purse. Someone bangs on the door, unlocks it, and there's a woman in the room telling me, "Pardon, you must get out now!" So I threw on jeans and a t-shirt, we ran down five flights of stairs, and out in the street. Handsome "sanspeurs," as I incorrectly call Parisian firemen, have snakes of waterhoses in the hotel lobby, and sirens are blaring and lights are flashing outside. The desk clerk has a print-out of the guests in the hotel's 33 rooms and is attempting to account for everyone. Natasha and I think it's rather funny. We have the cameras, the cash, the credit cards and the passports, so we're okay. I say to the desk clerk, "We can't do anything here, so we'll go to the bar and drink for a while." He say, "Madame, the bar is closed, the hotel is on fire!" I say, "No, not the hotel bar. Some other bar." He says, "Ah, oui! Bonne idée!" and Natasha and I head off for a couple of hours. When we came back, the furor was over, and everything seemed normal. No damage we could see. Supposedly it was the insulation over one of the ancient boilers in the basement.

WEDNESDAY
Through the Tuilleries with its carousel deserted and unattended, past ducks in the circular pools, to Place de la Concord and the spot where Marie-Antoinette was beheaded, all the way down the Champs-Elysées to Arch de Triumph. Then, to the Marais, and Place des Vosges and Musée Picasso and Musée Carnevelet and chic window-shopping. The best was glasses frames in a suite with matching earrings, necklaces and bracelets. And then, malheuresement, a cold rain started. So -- rain plan = Louvre, from 5:00 to its late closing.

And, as I remember, Wednesday was the day Natasha crashed from exhaustion and dehydration. She's not used to keeping up mom's intense tourist pace, which is slowing, due to BLISTERS. And bone pounding against bone in Mom's poor, fifty-year-old pieds. Natasha crawls onto her bed mid-afternoon, whipped, after downing a bottle of water. Poor baby. And I think she's homesick for her friends. The solution: Mom to bocquaniste's to buy a cigarette box with that famous tit-pinching painting at the Louvre on it as un petit cadeau for sleeping Natasha. This pleases her and her spirits seem to brighten a little.

Since Wednesday, I became a faithful user of Soulage les Ampoules, 6 pansements petit pour les pieds. It seems likely my pinkie toe will have to come off when we return to the E.U. Paris has claimed one of my toes! My feet look like I have leprosy from all the blisters!

THURSDAY
An early start to the day at the Musée D'Orsay and, in late afternoon, we give in to the irresistable impulse to buy shoes and head to les grands magasins in Boulevard Haussmann. Galleries LaFayette and Printemps -- four pairs of shoes purchased between the two of us, so we take a Euro 6 ride back to the hotel with the boxes. That evening, a lovely dinner in an incredibly decorated Moroccan restaurant in the 1eme arrondisement. I see a tiny dormouse in its restroom, upstairs with a private Morroccan dining salon, all dark and deserted.

FRIDAY
The game plan is to get up early and go to Les Catacombes. Alas, the line stretches around the block, and we can't waste time. So, we head off instead to Cimitière Montparnasse to visit the graves of Baudelaire, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Serge Gainsbourg, Jean Seberg and others, passing through an intriguing antiques street market to get there (costumes, lace, buttons, books, lamps). I have no cherries to place on the graves of my idols today, so they get Gitanes instead. Afterward, we channel F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Juliet Greco, Yves Klein and God only knows who else and have lunch at that last holdout of old Montparnasse, La Coupole -- oysters! We then explore the Latin Quartier, and find cheap clothes and a delightful anime/graphic novel figurine store where we purchase some souvenirs and gifts. We then head for the Jeu de Paume to check out the astounding Cindy Sherman retrospective that's currently exhibited there. Natasha takes off by herself to get an ice cream in the Tuilleries while I rest my poor feet outside. We go to a simple brasserie near the hotel for a late dinner, and share a creme brulée.

This trip, everything seems less awesome than the time I first saw it eleven years ago. I guess I'm growing jaded, having now seen Rome, Milan twice, Florence twice, Venice twice, Dublin, London and Vienna. I'll never forget how absolutely blown away and moved I was the very first time. Everything seems somehow diminished with familiarity. Like how subsequent massages never feel as good as the very first one. The surprise is gone?

If it were not for the incessant walking (and the "chic factor" that makes these terminally cool women wear excruciating high, stylish heels), I could almost certainly live in Paris. I like the coffee and wine drinking. I like the exquisite stuff in the windows. I like the Parisian style. I like the good dogs sitting at tables in bars and cafes. Not so much: the metro, nearly getting run over by motorcycles.

Natasha asks, "Why are there so many books everywhere?" I have to remind her that the French pride themselves on being intellectuals -- plus they can read on the subway since they aren't driving.

All the young people here are wired to their iPods or cell phones. They even talk on their phones in the metro.

I am simply awed by these chic Parisiennes walking miles in their high, excruciating heels. How do they do it? Natasha and I kept finding statues at the D'Orsay who were examining their feet. We assume, for blisters.

SATURDAY, MAY 27, 2006
Le dernier cri à Paris

So we get up very early and cross the Seine to the Rive Droite. Hardly anyone's stirring. Only the old, walking their dogs, and a few joggers. We get coffee and croissants in a 1eme arrondisement cafe just as it opens and are the only customers.

Then, we began to follow the "plan" to guide us through the shopping passages for two or three hours. I found it on the internet, thanks to a romantic and moody Parisienne photographer who posted it.

First, GALERIES et JARDIN du PALAIS ROYAL. Late 18th century. Incredible. Like the arcades in Venice surrounding the Piazzo San Marco. Dark, moody, Gorey-esque. Expect to see the vampire LeStat step out of an arch at any moment. Watchmaker, military honors medallions, swords, the vintage dress shop where Reese Witherspoon's Academy Award rented vintage gown came from. Exquisite, dark cafe with autographed movie star photos; hello, Jean Moreau. Marble mosaics. More than half the storefronts now ghostly, deserted. I would LIVE in one of these shops! Ghost memories of gambling houses, duels, cabarets, brothels, emerge in the early light.

Second, GALERIES COLBERT. Recently completely restored. A guard stands by. We peek in, but don't enter. A little too "done" and Italianate for my tastes.

We soon pass a street sign that tells us Collette lived and died on the second floor of the building. GALERIES VIVIENNE -- fantastic! More atmosphere, but less rundown than Vero-Dodat. High occupancy with modern couture shops, including Jean-Paul Gaultier. Bright and cheerful. A middle-aged man has morning tea with his aged mother at a cafe.

PASSAGE DES PANORAMAS. Like Vivienne, but includes the back door of the Comedie Française and a theatrical variety artist booking agent.

PASSAGE JOUFFROY. Next to Grevin Waxworks, with Hotel Chopin, where the composer lived, and, I believe, died. Toy shops! Miniature shops! We buy 19th century paper scraps and Petit Prince gifts.

Finally, PASSAGE VERDEAU, the seediest of the lot. Cheap Chinese-manufactured clothes, but a great movie poster and stills shop.

We emerge to find a candy store, La Mere de Famille, which must not have changed at all since 1920. Chocolate has cocoa percentages marked on it, up to 96%, I think. We go conservative and buy a dark, 70% cocoa bar and some real French burnt peanuts. The shop also displays marzipan fruits, animals and pastilles, and sugared almond wedding sweets and ribbon bags to hold them. Chic jade green boxes with lavender ribbons. Natasha buys candy for her friends here.

It's now 11:30 or so and we have stopped only once for coffee in La Bourse because Natasha was scared by a public toilet. We saw a homeless guy pushing a shopping basket to which was attached a large glass jug of what appeared to be piss. Probably his own.

So we decide to purchase items for a picnic lunch in the Les Halles street market. If the line at Les Catacombes is long like yesterday, we'll eat in the queue. I buy a stereotypical French string shopping bag at a hardware store for Euro 4, and we pick up a quarter pound of premium pate (Eu 3.50), a bagette (EU 0.38), a button of fresh goat cheese (Eu 2.20) and a bottle of Sancerre (EU 3.30) and get back on the metro. To Catacombs. Good news! Hardly a line at all, so to the park behind to properly enjoy our picnic on a bench. There is no way we can eat all the pate. We feed the birds left-over bread.

I can't verbalize too much about the impact of the catacombes except to say it's miles below street level, down a steep spiral staircase. Cold, damp, very dark, smells pleasantly mossy and the walls are stone-cold and wet to the touch. Water sometimes drips from overhead. Avenues to travel are clearly marked and cordoned off. Other avenues, stretching to infinity, are visible past iron gates. The sight of all those skulls and bones is shocking at first, then sad. Only skulls and long bones seem to be piled up and arranged. Where are the pelvises and ribcages, the hands, the feet?

Placards inform us in French that most of these folks were removed from "ancient cemeteries" and churches in 1850-1880. I assume, to make way for new housing developments -- like in Poltergeist. I tried to picture the Resistance patriots holding their secret meetings, and it's not hard to do, in that labyrinth. When we were leaving, I shined my flashlight (Clever girl! I had it on a keychain in my purse!) down a gated alley. It was sad to see the mountains of shattered skulls and bones mouldering in the dark, as if the ovens at Aushchwitz had been opened and shoveled out there. Lots of Momento Mori sentiments on carved plaques throughout. Moving -- sad -- timeless -- strangely peaceful. A sign at the entrance warns it's not a place for children or "sensitive persons." Touring the catacombes was evidently all the rage for the Victorian English on the Grand Tour; black map marks on the ceiling put there for those visitors still guide you along the routes.

Then, out of the catacombes and on to search for the proper metro to take us to the doll museum. It was 3:30 by that time, but our trek took us pleasantly and unexpectedly through a Montparnasse street market to get to the proper metro line. Finally! Centre Georges Pompidou, and, nearby, Musee des Poupées. It was great, well-curated and less dark, dusty and scary than Pollock's Toy Museum in London. Lovingly done. Lots of mothers, grandmothers and little girls there. Highlights: HUGE Jumeaus, Maurice Chevalier and Mistinguet dolls, photos of real children with toys now in the collection. I bought two tiny black baby dolls for my collection. And for further therapy. I'm always trying to replace the two black baby dolls of my early childhood, the ones my grandmother forced me to give the neighbor girl with scarlet fever when I was a pre-schooler. Les Poupées Noires.

We limped back to the hotel, past the bocquanistes a final time. 6:00 p.m. Crashed a while, Natasha packed, we admired our treasures and consolidated everything. I save so much paper and bags and labels -- to use in collages.

We had a laughing fit over the by then five-hour-old pate. We wanted to fling it out our window and hopefully onto the unsuspecting heads of novice tourists on the annoying seven language tour bateau mouche with the flashing lights and loud speakers. Like that hair clog remover commercial on t.v. where the gross clog gets blasted "far away" and lands on the snotty French people's elegant cafe table. (But, we resisted.)

We rested a couple of hours before limping toward St. Germain-des-Prés a final time for pizza and salad and chic window browsing sans tourists, since the shops were by then closed. Then we limped all the way back to the hotel. Natasha's now sawing logs. It's nearly 11. I better go to sleep, since the airport shuttle comes for us tomorrow at 9:30.

Time: I'm experiencing it so differently here. The days begin early and are very, very full. We do and see as much in one of these days as a tourist as we do in a week or more at home. Resolved: I must maximize my time the rest of my life and get more out of it. Like I am here, on this trip.

*******

So, as I did before, I'll try to recap what's happened since I last wrote. Which seriously seems like a month ago now. But it was really only three days.

Sunday morning in Paris:
We woke very early, finished packing, went for a last early morning neighborhood walk. Returned to a cafe we'd visited a couple of times before. Handsome young guys cleaned and prepared the cafe for the day's business, and we finally got the cinematic "kitty cup" (giant bowl) of coffee. A waiter ran to a nearby bakery and returned with oven-warm croissants for us. Hardly anyone in the neighborhood was awake and active. Our tabac was closed Sundays, so we couldn't get more Gitanes avec filtres to take to Amsterdam. Returned to the hotel up a new street closer to Musee de Monnaie and browsed the antique store windows a last time. Photographed the Nureyev plaque -- I forgot to mention he lived (and died) next door to our hotel.

Airport shuttle arrived early to pick up two other fares after us. Nice, unexpected review of the Marais. A car ride is a nice way to see everything we'd walked through, and I was astounded at the amount of territory we'd covered. Truly, we did every central arrondisement at least once during the week. Then, the high speed trip to Charles de Gaulle. Very light traffic on a Sunday morning so early. We checked in, got to our gate, and I enjoyed KLM's fine selection of free French newspapers. When we boarded, we were delighted to find we'd been upgraded to First Class! You know what that means! Two seats to a row! Champagne! And a better lunch! KLM rules!

The flight from Paris was very short, so we soon arrived at Schiphol, retrieved Natasha's checked bag and got a cab. Euro 38 to houseboat. Louk and his little daughter, Juliette, were on top of their boat when we drove up and let us into ours, which is simply adorable. And even better than in the photos which seduced me into renting it! It's entirely furnished in Ikea, or built-ins. The sky-blue bathroom with its industrial stainless steel floors and counter and gorgeous graceful tub and sink is the best bathroom I've ever seen. Skylights over the tub, portholes, skylights throughout the boat, wood floors, white walls. I could live here FOREVER. Plenty of space, and well-designed flow. Natasha points out it's the same size as a standard trailer. We immediately put our filthy jeans in to wash and dry, and sat out on the deck to watch rowboats pass by on the Amstel and to scope out the neighboring boats. We're moored in Der Pijp.

We decided to strike out to explore our new neighborhood, and to try to find a tabac open, armed with a Streetwise map. Without strippenkarten with which to ride the tram, we were forced to strike out on foot in what intuitively semed to be the way to go, judging from bicycle traffic. It turns out we were wrong -- we walked through miles of run-down ethnic neighborhoods in housing built after World War II, not the picturesque 17th century. Sunday: no businesses open. The Dutch must be religious. Finally we curved off on a main highway and decided to try to find a bar open. It was freezing cold and windy. We found one with a kind of Black Forest motif open, dark wood, dark bricks. Out front stood a huge crane, inscrutable even when I approached him; he slowly walked away from me as I spoke to him. We entered to find ourselves in a friendly neighborhood bar with a regulation pool table. The bartender spoke English, and I was able to order my first jenevers and Natasha an Amstel beer. Warmed up a little, we struck out again, passing a huge windmill. Then, wonder of wonders, we found a grocery store open and decided to lay in provisions and eat dinner on the boat. Cheerful, clean, bright store, with Euro prices that seemed totally equivalent to or cheaper than Austin's. We walked with four heavy grocery bags back through what we later figured out was Ousterpark. Got back to the blessed cosy boat, made dinner and coffee which we enjoyed in front of the t.v. (no t.v. in the room in Paris). We'd walked three hours!

We soon realized Dutch is indecipherable. The subtitles on the screen in English don't help much in figuring it out, and it isn't that much like German, as we'd been told. It has all kinds of J's in it. We have no idea of the phoentic rules, and for that reason had been unsuccessful in learning a few key phrases in advance from travel books. Luckily, there are plenty of English language shows from the U.S. and the BBC on Dutch t.v.: movies, Oprah and Dr. Phil, C.S.I. And Dutch home-shopping network. And Dutch, French and German M-TV. The Dutch have an unfair advantage: they know so much more about American culture than we know about theirs because of t.v.

We ate, got the clean clothes out of the drier, took marvelous hot baths, and crashed hard about midnight -- with no real sense yet of Amsterdam.

MONDAY, MAY 29, 2006

Up early to discover Amsterdam is cold and windy as a mofo. We had to layer all our clothes to keep warm enough. Found a convenience store that sold strippenkarten for the tram. Then took off to Centraal Station to try to start at the top and work our way back down the city. Coffee at a cafe, map and compass consulting and then on a route Natasha, master navigator, figured out through the Jordaan to the Pink Point (queer info kiosk) and the Homo Monument

Nearby we saw the huge line snaked round the block at Anne Frankhuis and looked at the building itself from across the street. And then we found the statue of Anne and the impromptu daily shrine made at its feet by visitors. Next door to the Frank's hiding place is a huge Christian church. The Franks must perpetually have heard the tolling of the churchbells while they were in hiding at the secret annex. It made me a little sick.

We browsed through a great Monday antique and bric-a-brac street market nearby. And here my remembrance of the day begins to fade. We walked through many beautiful neighborhoods on canals, with the characteristic Amsterdam architecture -- chocolate colors, white trim, gabled, always with a hook hanging from the highest point of the house's facade, reflections of the building shimmering in the water of the canals. After much gawking and walking, we decided to return to the boat to rest a little. A huge line waited for our outbound tram, and then a cabdriver drove by and shouted to everyone that the tram line was down. We were able to share a cab with two other women who were waiting and headed toward our area to get home. The funny cab driver -- a kind of Dutch Don Rickles -- loved Las Vegas and gave me his cell phone number to call to arrange our ride to the airport when we departed Thursday.

So we rested a moment before striking out for nearby Cuypmarkt, supposedly the longest street market in Europe judging from its p.r. in travel books -- but I kind of doubt it. Paris and Vienna both have bigger ones, at least to my reckoning. Cheap, Chinese-manufactured trendy clothing, produce, flowers, cheese, a booth where you can eat the legendary raw herring (ew!). Various cheap trifles purchased there, including Eu 5 Indian scarves.

We made dinner, then took the tram to Rembrandtplein, near where Natasha believed we'd find the lesbian bars. The tram ride took us past the incredible art deco Tushchinski movie theatre, the dream constructed by a Polish Jew killed during the Holocaust who believed in the transformative powers of cinema. Rembrandtplein is full of huge, looming, spot-lit bars. And then, we got lost. We must have taken a left when we should have taken a right, and ended up walking miles in a handsome, upscale residential neighborhood at twilight -- saw lots of dogs being walked. Saw Magere Bruge (Skinny bridge) and Carre, built to house the circus in the 19th century. Still lost, we admitted defeat and turned a corner to try to find our way back to where we could catch the tram home -- and immediately stumbled across the bar Natasha sought, Vive la Vie. Intimate, dark, with photos of female movie star icons, including Shirley Temple! Natasha and I had a nice, long chat over beer and jenevers. Great music in the bar.

We are indeed intrepid travelers, my daughter and I, and I salute us. We caught the very last tram to the boat after midnight in the freezing wind. We could see our breath, and ice crystals in the air. Natasha unlocked the boat's door, we tumbled down the ladder and into our blessed, warm beds.

TUESDAY, MAY 30, 2006.

We sleep in until 10, because it's pouring buckets of rain. Then up, to Museumplein to visit the Van Gogh Museum for the Rembrandt/Caravaggio comparision show, a temporary exhibit. My favorite: St. Catherine and her wheel. Natasha's: Head of Holofernes. In my opinion, there's simply no comparing Caravaggio and Rembrandt. Caravaggio is without a doubt the better painter. After the show, we stumbled across a wonderful post card store with thousands of cards filed alphabetically by subject. We explored the Bloemenmarkt (flower market) and coveted flowers, black tulips, cactii and bulbs we can't import to the U.S. We stumbled across a fabulous hammock store nearby, and I bought Natasha a hammock there for her new place when she moves out. At lunch we finally got to sample the legendary Amsterdam french fries with mayonnaise-- but the mayo tastes good, like it's got some kind of mustard or spices in it. On the street they come in paper cones.

And, on Tuesday, I discovered the key to foot comfort: a EU 3 pair of black tourist socks with the shield of Amsterdam on them. They've done my poor, ravaged feet a world of good -- although I would ordinarily NEVER wear socks and sandals. But my feet were freezing! We had to buy caps, too. Natasha got a sensible grey one, but I decided on a EU 5 Che Guevara cap with "revolution" stitched on it, at a tourist stand. Plus Natasha is now sporting a rather nice Eu 5 saffron-colored pashmina for her throat.

Mid-afternoon: to Dam's Square and Nieuwe Kerk. A zoo of tourists, cheap souvenirs, fast food -- out of automats, in one place! Horse carts to rent for tours. For a couple of moments I pondered hiring a rickshaw to tour the Red Light District. I feel sort of sorry for Amsterdam being saddled with a reputation because of the Red Light District. It's maybe less than 1% of the land-mass in central Amsterdam, and a total anomaly with the rest of the city (and hidden away where you don't just stumble on it), yet it's the first thing most people think of when you say Amsterdam. What a shame, really. During the afternoon, no windows were occupied by prostitutes, but the area was abuzz with porn shops, bondage shops, leather shops, tattoo parlors, piercing parlors, rubber shops, you name it. All of this kind of freaked me out, honestly. Packs of roving, scary men, many of them on r&r from off-shore drilling outfits, filled the streets. A dark man yells at me, "Hey, blondie! You! You want a job?" YIKES. So we head out.

Then we found the cute hot gay bar we'd read about, Getto, for a quick drink and restroom stop. Great rockabilly music, and a white bar cat, who energetically applied himself to his scratching point to the beat of the music.

Then back to the boat, hot baths, and dinner in a great neighborhood cafe, Bloemer's. Delicious food, great music, fun crowd of young people. Hand-made, excellent mojitos. Finally got to sample bitterballen, an Amsterdam specialty -- small, fried breaded (meat? fish?) balls eaten with mustard -- kind of like hushpuppies. Home at 10. Natasha to bed. It's 11:30 now. I am falling asleep as I write.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 31, 2006, 9:30 p.m.

Another unbelievably cold, windy day with ice crystals in the air. At 11:00 a.m., a bank thermometer said 11C (52F). The wind chill made it seem much worse. Everyone tells us it's a freak storm, that it should be sunny and warm by now. Oh, well. Feels like January or February in Austin to us.

But at least today we started off properly attired in layers of shirts, socks and caps, as well as yards of scarves. It was pouring when we awoke, so we took our time starting out. Our first stop was the cafe of the Christmas Twins, The Backstage. We'd learned about it from an Amsterdam travel show we'd seen on television. We had to cool our heels until it opened at 10, but then Gary and his neighbor Wilhelm (who looked like the lovechild of Wilhelm DaFoe and Mick Jagger) opened up the wild and whimsically painted joint. It's coffee and crocheted hat heaven, with memorabilia of the twins' cabaret career displayed everywhere. Gary, dressed in purple, gave Natasha an impromptu psychic reading: "Brilliant, versatile, but lazy. Lacks self-confidence." He told her she could achieve all her dreams if she'd only go for them, believing. He had nothing for me, except he kept swearing he'd met me before. We had a great chat, and he spoke lovingly of his dead twin, the "mastermind" of the pair who always wore shorts to show off his great legs. Gary was so sweet and modest. Natasha photographed him, then he gave us autographed cards. How Linda Montano would LOVE him! What a lovely, funny, sweet spirit. And he must be in his eighties, but has the sweet, smooth face of a Black American Indian, a Buffalo soldier descendant. This was one of the most profoundly wonderful and memorable experiences of the whole trip. You can learn more about the Christmas Twins from this article:
http://www.expatica.com/source/site_article.asp?subchannel_id=66&story_id=183&name=All+the+world's+a+stage

We passed about an hour with Gary, then set off with the map and compass in the bitter cold to search out a minor wax-works and creepy doll hospital adjoining it. We got totally lost, as usual, and ended up, instead, at Joods Historich Museum. Which, as luck would have it, is right next to Waterlooplein street market, which we had hoped to find and visit later in the day. How fortunate for us! We'd have never found it if we had cold-heartedly set out to find it. Our travel genie was with us!

Waterlooplein is a great street market with new and second-hand clothes, jewelry, etc. I bought Natasha a pocket watch. She bought suspenders. I bought a slinky red dress from Italy, a witchy paisley skirt, and an Indonesian batik apron-skirt. Natasha got a batik wristband with hidden zipper pocket. The stall owner gave us both a free leather bracelet. By the time we'd finished shopping we were frozen again and our noses were running, so we ducked into a nearby cafe for coffee and lunch. Afterward, I used a Dutch pay phone successfully, feeding it Euro coins to reconfirm our flight home tomorrow and to order a cab from Rene, the laughing cabdriver from the tram break-down rescue the other day.

After lunch, we went to the Stopera to mail postcards and to a nearby grocery store for chocolate to bring home as gifts. I scored a Droste cocoa tin with a nun on it! We passed an old man cranking an antique hurdy-gurdy.

Natasha and I agreed we were totally pooped and chilled to the bone, so we caught the tram off Dam's Square and Romin to come back to the boat for a while for coffee and a snugly nap. Really, by then there was little left we wanted to see in Amsterdam. We're both running out of steam now. Both of us are exhausted and not just a little homesick. We miss our little Buster and all our people. So we slept for a couple of hours, then I got up and packed for our departure tomorrow, cleaned the boat up a little, and washed and dried dishes.

We went for a final dinner at Boehmer's around the corner. It was nice to be somewhere warm and crowded with happy, noisy people this gray, cold day.

I wrote a thank-you note in our hosts' guest book (today we FINALLY saw Suzanne with Juliette and a new baby) and now I'm journaling as Natasha watches t.v. on the couch beside me, under a duvet. She's packed. We have LOADS of souvenirs and gifts and must check our clothing baggage tomorrow on the flights. Gifts for everyone -- YAY!!!

I'll have to recap my impressions of Amsterdam in a couple of days. For now, all I can say is, the Dutch are so not pussies. We had to buy hats, but the Dutch ride around hatless always in the cold wind on their bicycles. And nobody wears gloves. What a hearty bunch! Even Gary of the Christmas Twins restated that this May is the coldest one he's experienced in thirty years. As sure as we depart, it will be all sunshine and clear skies!

Oh, well. At least Natasha and I got a temporary reprieve from Austin's unbearably hot summer.

This was exactly the right amount of time in Amsterdam for me: three nights, four days. That's plenty to see everything if you stay close in; we spent a good deal of time just getting back and forth from the boat. But it was so nice to be in this little oasis of cosy calm away from the throngs of ganja-stupid youngsters in city center. I'd recommend the houseboat option to anyone wanting something a little different and totally Amsterdam.

We're leaving, and we still know hardly any Dutch.
Kaas = cheese
Nee = no
Romin = window
Roken = smoking
(And we never made it to the Sheepfarten Museum.)

All for now. I'm struggling to keep my eyes open. Up early for the airport. 10:30, and it's just now beginning to get dark!

Back home.

The flights home were unremarkable and the comic cabdriver, Rene, arrived just at the time we'd arranged. It was sad to leave the boat, but a relief to leave the cold and wind to come home to Buster.

I feel a little disoriented and beaten today. Natasha and I went out for breakfast and had chips and salsa to start it. We're both craving spicy food.

I have to let the whole trip wash over me now. As usual, I'll miss the architectural beauty of Europe, the great coffee, the great bread. I will not miss the indecipherable, enigmatic Dutch language, feeling lost and vulnerable and always consulting maps, or the unseasonably cold weather.

I think what will remain, aside from the joy and dream-come-true of sharing it all with Natasha, is my memories of the passages in Paris. I love them, their desolate, romantic melancholy, the sense that a lonely vampire could emerge from a darkened doorway. I'm so grateful to Natasha for being willing to devote a morning to searching them out.

I had a beautiful dream last night of coming on a passage, but it was set around a canal bridge, like in Amsterdam. Shops displayed plaster big-head statuettes of silent movie stars, like Chaplin, and other memorabilia that appeals to me so much. The passage was decorated with gold-glittering Art Nouveau tile mosaics, and a tiled fountain in the center where people playfully waded and soaked their feet. In the distance, I saw Sacre Coeur on the horizon, and, in the sky, an enigmatic, blinking neon sign. First it said, "Hotel de Ville." Then it changed to "Hotel de Vol" (of flight, or fast break-aways). And, finally, it changed to "Hotel de Vent" (of the wind). I felt a sense of profound happiness when I awoke from the dream.

I loved this trip. I hope it was as profoundly enjoyable and important to Natasha as it was for me, and that the trip was everything she'd hoped it would be.

Dublin (2004)

2009-06-25T11:45:00.012-05:00

Dublin is unexpectedly Goth. I love it. Now it totally makes sense how Dublin and its pale, sooty Gothic cathedral were sources for Bram Stoker in creating the vampire imagery in Dracula.

The Guinness brewery takes up blocks and blocks and blocks -- a chocolate-brown brick compound with beautiful black iron gates with the gold harp insignia as ornaments. The street signs are written in both Irish and English. Irish has no vowels and is completely inscrutable to me. No intuitive translation possibilities at all, as with a Romance language.

Tea: it's impossible to get a bad cup anywhere! There are tubes of brown and white sugar provided, and milk. I went to the famous Bewley's Oriental Tea house and sat in a small Victorian tea room under the stairs, where a fire blazed merrily in the fireplace. Bewley's is evidently a popular spot for Sunday breakfast and it was very crowded. A middle-aged man and his elderly mother sit at the next table and I snoop on their conversation. It seems to have something to do with a business or investment matter. Both of them solidly curse "the bastard!" repeatedly and chain-smoke.

Then down O'Connell streets, both upper and lower. Road construction tears up the boulevards. A trolley system to replace the one ripped out in the 1960's is being installed. To the River Liffey, across O'Connell Street bridge and down the quay to Ha'Penny bridge with its white spires and curlicues. The Liffey is shallow and muddy, but swift-moving. It's a beautiful, sunny cold Sunday. Young families are out everywhere with babies in strollers. Dublin is a city of life-size bronze statues: "the tart with the cart," "the floozy in the jacuzzi," James Joyce, and, of course, Oscar Wilde polychromed, with young gay men stretched out next to him for photographs.

Dublin seems very clean, very cosmopolitan, very young and very hip these days due to the booming high-tech industry here. The litter bins are black with gold decorations like the Guinness cans. I'm having a hard time adjusting to the "look left" required of pedestrians because of vehicles driving on the opposite side of the road to that which I'm accustomed. The desk clerk says the Dublin buses are undependable, so just walk. It's easily done, I found out.

There are bullet holes in walls of buildings near my hotel. I should have done my research on the events of 1916, aside from reading Yeats and The Dubliners again before my arrival. I'm so ignorant about the battle for Irish independence it's appalling. Much of Dublin's architecture is beautifully Georgian and there are still horse-drawn carriages to be hired at St. Stephen's Green. Rows and rows of nearly identical townhouses with painted doors -- red, green, yellow, blue -- and lace curtains in the windows of their upper stories. Elaborate door knockers on some of the painted doors. Brick streets.

Guinness built blocks of tenement houses for its employees of red brick with tiny courtyards between them. I can see the ghosts of children in turn-of-the-century black stockings playing on the stoops. There's an alcohol treatment center established in the 1700's just across from the Guinness brewery. The nutty warm smell of hops wafts across the street.

Black painted shop facades with gold letters, like in Paris, sit side by side with slick, modernist buildings. Nothing's taller than about six stories so it's not a towering, modern vertical city and skyscrapers don't choke out the rather subdued light.

Betting parlors everywhere, where men sit on stools and gamble away their hard-earned wages. A gypsy fortune-teller glimpsed in a glass-ceiling arcade market from the 19th century. Elaborate building facades made of glazed, ceramic tiles, dark green, or else, the color of toffee. An old sign on a building advertising a cure for baldness. The band U2's swanky bar. The Gaiety. The General Post Office with bullet holes in its walls from 1916 and a statue of a fallen patriot.

They say "sorry" here rather than "excuse me" or "pardon." They call you "lady" rather than "ma'am" or "miss." In a pub I saw an old advertising mirror for Schweppe's Lethia and Moldavia.

I will definitely buy a red plaid toque with a pompom on top while I am here. And when I wear it back home, I will remember Dublin.

Vienna (2004)

2009-06-25T11:45:00.003-05:00

So now begins what's sure to be a very long day, from Venice to Vienna. I hope I can sleep on the train once it's well underway. I'm told this trip I'm on is one of the legs of the Orient Express route in the old days.

I have real reservations about Vienna because the German-speaking tourists I encounter in Italy and Paris are fat, loud, ugly and rude. Plus, I don't like the sound of the German language itself and never have any luck at all learning it myself. Plus, these German-speakers seem often to have an air of vague superiority and entitlement that I don't like at all.

3:10 p.m. Two hours outside Venice on the moving train. Wow! Italian Alps! We're going through tunnels now from time to time and seem to be climbing. The mountains are huge!

4:00 p.m. We are now officially in Austria. The signs I see whizzing by are written in German. Logging. A-frame houses and chalets that look like houses on a cuckoo clock.

5:00 p.m. We are all the way into Austria now. The signs have all changed to German and the architecture is no longer like in Italy. Everything is very green. We traveled across a bridge over a lake. Seems too cold to me, but people were swimming. Conductor says train is running fast and we will arrive early at Wien Sudbanhof -- at just after 9:00 p.m.

+ + + + + + +

So. Vienna. It is cold and drizzly outside: frankly, miserable. I have all the wrong clothes, having just come from sunny Italy. I am sitting in the famous Loos American Bar. I am smoking a cigarette and drinking a kaffée mèlange in what must be one of the earliest examples of Modernist Chic in the known world. It's Paris-dark, tiny, with tiny tables with lighted tops and metal edges and a checkered wood parquet floor. I think the door said it's open from noon until 4:00 a.m. There is tortoise stained glass in blocks in the bar's front and a burled wood ceiling with rectangular inserts. There is a big sign on the door that says ABSOLUTELY NO PHOTOGRAPHS.

I am alone in Loos American Bar except for the thin, chic, black-clothes-wearing female bartender. There are seven bentwood bar stools, two L-shaped black leather couches, one tiny, high table in the front window, et c'est ça! The telephone and toilets seem to be located down a few narrow winding steps; I will check them out before I leave.

Last night when I arrived at Sudbanhof it was like being lost in a De Chirico painting. I walked what felt like miles down empty tracks before arriving in the huge, empty concrete station with its inscrutible German signs. I immediately felt my spirits plummet. Graffitti-vandalized banks of telephones and the gritty, urban setting jarred me after having just been in Venice.

But soon I got a cab at the taxi stand and arrived at the small townhouse near the zoo which I am to share a modernized apartment with one of our graduate students for the few days I'll be here.

+ + + + + + +

Yesterday I went with the student group to the famous summer palace one arrives at by walking through the famous tree-lined park -- or is it a tiergarten? -- like in The Third Man. Can you tell I have a profound mental block against everything having to do with the German language? The people here are all very polite and all seem to speak English, but the place lacks soul, for want of a better word.

Felix was an incredibly gracious and welcoming host. We took off on foot on a tour that began with lunch at a street market and didn't end until long after midnight when I, exhausted, took a taxi back to the townhouse and fell into my bed. I saw the outside of everything in Vienna. I'm so ignorant of the historical significance of everything I see and I so dislike Baroque style that much is lost on me. I am an idiot. But at mid-afternoon, at least, I was able to treat Felix to kaffée and Sachertorte at Hotel Sacher. I am so on a Third Man mission. Piano music trickled in from somewhere. Felix and I had a million great conversations as we strolled, but I am visually and mentally over-loaded now. I can't even recount all I saw. A pulpit with naturalistic busts in the cathedral. Horse-drawn fiacres. Brick streets. A Turkish pixie statue, the size of a child, with an earring and pointed slippers holding a cup of coffee on the second story of a building with a sign in gold numerals, 1886. A famous chocolate shop with exquisite, tiny paper boxes. Freud's home. The Art Nouveau apartments. Loos tailors' building. Punks. The scent of glue. An Italian church with ex-votos dating back to WWII: "He died for his country." Kaffee Central, the cathedral of coffee houses. A dozen Third Man settings which make visible the impossible, surreal geography of Vienna portrayed in the film. The spire of a cathedral lit up at night like the vertebrae of some fabulous slain dragon. Baroque fountains bathed in white lights. Theatres and opera houses, including the one where Alida Valli's character in The Third Man performed. The balcony where Hitler announced the Aunschlöss. I can't possibly remember it all.

Our academic program is quartered at a private palace, Palazzo Cabelli -- some Italian army officer built it and his great-great-great granddaughter still lives in one wing and rents out the rest to make her taxes and pay for its upkeep.

In the Schloss Schönbrunn we learned all about Franz Josef, Sisi, Napoleon II and his lark, Mozart's performances for Marie-Therese and little Marie-Antoinette and various anecdotes about tragic Rudolf and the murder-suicide at the hunting lodge at Mayerling, which has since been given over to nuns.

It's sad. All I know about Vienna is due entirely to the movie The Third Man. Hard to picture such a Baroque place bombed out and in rubble. There is a kind of radical hippie Green thing going on here now. It must be a city of profound contradictions, but I'm just not getting into the vibe of it. It's not my visual cup of tea. I can't figure out the layout and I don't much trust the U-bahn because I don't read German. I feel much more secure above ground, hoofing it. I doubt I will ever return again to Vienna. I'm not a Mozart freak, and it's just not very interesting to me here. But I do want to see the Secession House before I leave. That I am looking forward to!

+ + + + + + +

Another cold, windy, rainy day in Vienna. Yesterday Felix and I went to the Technisches Museum to see the train car of Sisi, an elegant, black train car, tricked out dark and Goth inside. And gramaphones, electric pianos, antique computers, turbines, glass and water calculators, glass eyes from Venice, a Parisian feathered fan like the one my mother inherited...

Then another long, philosophical conversation with Felix over a mélange and a marbled pastry that starts with the letter "E," named for Hayden's benefactor. These many long conversations with Felix have been nothing short of miracles in their leaps and sharings and imaginings and I will miss them when I leave Vienna. We had lunch today (white asparagus soup!) at a restaurant next door to the house where the poet Auden spent his final years. This now makes sense: the poem about Icarus falling and the Breughel painting. I had the best intentions of making it to the Secession House today but the dreary, cold rain and my clothes being all wrong make it too dismal. Maybe tomorrow the weather will ease up, and if it doesn't, I will just force myself to go, anyway. But no more churches! Basta!

My old shoulder injury hurts like a toothache in this cold damp.

Today in his class Felix played a video of The Magic Flute for his students. It occurs to me that The Magic Flute has been the leitmotif of this trip, just as images of Don Quixote were during my 1995 trip to Europe. I can picture my mother as a kind of Queen of the Night, and me as Pamina. Then I started thinking about my marriage to Mark and how it was a total misalliance, as absurd as a coupling between Papageno and Pamina. Our marriage didn't work because Mark needed his Papagena. But where is my Tamino?

After class I took the opportunity to explore the Pallazo Cabelli, which I had been dying to do. There is a grand ballroom, and all the many rooms are painted or papered in different colors and have their own fireplaces in differing styles. I examined all the unoccupied rooms at my leisure, without witnesses. I sniffed the air. I touched the window sills. I imagined.

I have now learned that Cabelli's descendant who lives here is an ancient, mean little woman. I hoped to catch a glimpse of her, and today I did. She wore a red loden coat, a red figured headscarf and sensible shoes -- a woman now in her eighties. She went out in the rain with her umbrella and little wheeled wire grocery cart. I wish she were simpatico because I would love to coax stories out of her about the palace. Imagine what she must know or remember from her childhood about how life was once lived in this space! There is a room on the second floor that must once have been a sun room or greenhouse room: it has illusionistic trellises painted on its walls and ceiling, and plants, all in light green. It's so hard for me as an American to grasp the fact that a building of this size and magnificence could once have been a private residence. It would be like living in an opera house to me.

+ + + + + + +

Last whirlwind tour of Vienna, still in the cold, miserable driving rain.

Yellow paint
Ceramic fireplaces, like huge tea pots
Crows cawing
Huge, nasty chocolate colored slugs in the garden
Kunsthistoriches Museum -- crashed in front of Caravaggio to rest feet
Antique store windows
Rabbis
Schubert's third story apartment
Schubert Winterreise and the hurdy-gurdy man
Knize perfumery, where Rudolf got his cologne
The Casanova Club from The Third Man
Art Nouveau restrooms
Mad dash for the Anker Clock at noon
Loos American Bar again beforehand
Secession Building finally
Mozart impersonators carrying their wigs in hat boxes on the U-bahn on their way to work
Dinner with Felix in a restaurant in a stone basement, like cloisters, supposedly a famous one -- delicious bread on a plank, boiled potatoes at bottom of salad

but I never got to go on the tour that would have taken me into the Vienna sewers, the Third Man zither theme ringing in my ears.

Venice (2004)

2009-06-25T11:44:00.001-05:00

Got to Milano's Stazione Centrale in a taxi driven by an Anna Magnani look-alike. Had already made and paid for my infernal prenotazione two days before, after waiting an hour in queue to do so. Centrale is such a Mussolini-looking job and I marvel at the birds and pigeons flying around inside its gritty interior. A character who looked as if someone had smashed a wine botle over his head last night tried to beg from me but succeeded only in getting one cigarette. My departure binario was posted no where and my train to Venice allegedly left in fifteen minutes. But finally, five minutes before the train was scheduled to depart, a scratchy announcement of the binario was made and I rushed to my train with a crushing crowd and found the first class car in which I'd made my prenotazione. Totally packed train corridor! Couldn't even get close to my compartment for the bodies, wedged against each other like sardines, and no one would let me pass so I could take my seat, despite my pleas. First class, my ass! I was lucky to find a place in the stairwell beside the WC, and I sat on my bag for most of the three hour journey, smelling urine all the sweltering way.

At one point, the refreshment "ding-ding" cart tried to come through and a riot nearly erupted. A tall businessman and an Italian mama shouted the vendor down, telling him it was impossible to come through the corridor. The cart guy kept insisting angrily it was his right to make a living. I thought it was going to come to blows!

On the final leg of the journey, after a brief stop in Verona, I started speaking with an old gay couple who had also found space by the WC, a male nurse and an English teacher from Minnesota. They say they come to Italy every year and rent a villa near Venice. One was obese, nearly blind and suffering from Parkinson's. He wore a turtleneck robe outfit and a huge cross on a chain around his neck and moved painfully with the assistance of a cane. We chatted about the Guthrie theatre and the old guy regaled me with tales of Gielgud and Guthrie, or "Sir Tyrone" or whatever Guthrie's name was. His partner drank a tall scotch out of a cut-crystal tumbler from the portable bar in a leather trunk with which the couple travels.

Finally the train arrived at Santa Lucia in Venice. I decided to go ahead and get my prenotazione for my trip on to Vienna in a few days while I was passing through the station; blessedly, there was only a short line and no troubles. Then on to Vaporetto 1 to San Marco. Found my hotel fairly easily, very cosy and right in the midst of the pricy designer boutiques. A very friendly, very handsome and very old dapper gentleman, Ramundo, former antiques dealer and alleged "friend" of Peggy Guggenheim (and her stinky little dogs, he says) greeted me and gave me the key to my room. Tiny, but cute. The entire building was obviously once a private home. My bathroom's shower is a spigot in the wall and there's a drain in the bathroom floor. Wow. Elegant, economical solution. This doesn't bother me at all, but my mother wouldn't be happy with this bathroom arrangement.

Struck out to Piazza San Marco about 4:00 to try to accomplish some gift shopping and get it over with. Remarkably, I found the same shop again where I bought necklaces before in Venice and got something for everyone I'd promised a gift to. Starving, I stumbled upon a tiny tree-shaded café with lattices to provide privacy and had a salad and pizza and a good glass of red wine.

Walked to Rialto, then to my former hotel, then past the bar where I spent time in 1995. I stopped in for a coffee. Piero, the bartender then, is now the owner of the place! He was there behind the bar chatting up a female patron. The place, and he, are little changed in nine years. I'm glad he's doing well in the world.

After another hour of getting lost in the Venetian labyrinth I returned to my hotel and accepted an invitation from Ramundo to go around the corner to "his" bar and have a spritz with him -- prosecco and Campari, great! Afterward, we stood outside the hotel door for a while and chatted in the twilight; he gave me art gallery and museum recommendations. Being in Venice tomorrow, a Sunday, is maybe not such great timing?

Now I'll go steam up the tiny bathroom, shower and then go to sleep to Italian television. And I get breakfast in bed tomorrow! I hear the clack of plates drifting in my open window from a restaurant down below.

+ + + + + + +

Had a coffee at a little table outside at Caffé Florian. That place is so cool. I love the ancient, dark paneling. Are there tiny private salons inside, I wonder? It's so old and dark and Goth. I love it! It seems like Casanova could be in there.

Trekked to L'Accademia to see all the Tintorettos. Incredible! I wish I had time to draw while visiting these museums. The bathroom doors in L'Accademia are painted like doors to galleries, worthy of exhibition themselves. Rested my pounding feet outside for a few moments before striking off to the Guggenheim. Most moved by the little doggie graves next to Peggy's. Enjoyed a photograph of Peggy on the terrace with wild Felliniesque sunglasses and her arms full of little dogs. Of course, my favorites there are the Joseph Cornell works: "Fortune-Telling Parrott," "Scene for a Fairy Tale" and "Ski Shutes and Ladders."

Then back to hotel to change clothes; it was unseasonably cold all day with a few sprinkles. Grabbed a pannini on the way in. Then back to Florian for a spritz and to listen to the musicians playing outside -- "Un Bel Di." Then, just at sunset, to the vaporetto to tour the Grand Canal at the golden hour. Rode all the way to the end of the line, got off, waited for next vaporetto, did it again until twilight was over and darkness had fallen. Sublime. One could nearly agree to die happy after that ride.

+ + + + + + +

After a big rowing contest and regatta concluded mid-morning and the lagoon was no longer full of boats, I took a vaporetto out to Lido. I wanted to see L'Hôtel des Bains from Death in Venice. I went to the beach with its rows of cabañas and families swimming. The ocean in the distance is blurry, shimmering gray-blue. Very tranquil to see it in the cool of the morning. I wandered a long way from the vaporetto landing to the beach side of the island, then back again. It was very pleasant to be on Lido away from the droves of tourists at Piazza San Marco. On Lido, people strolled and walked their dogs leisurely of a Sunday morning, lingering over their coffee, heading for the beach on bicycles. The architecture on Lido was lovely -- from villas to modernist 1930's apartment buildings. I walked down a beautiful, shaded street and heard someone in a palazzo practicing harp.

After spending three hours on Lido I caught the vaporetto back to San Marco and immediately after I boarded, there was a ruckus. A young woman had gone white and fainted. One of the workers on the vaporetto had her about the waist, trying to stand her upright. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she was as greenish-white as a Pontormo dead Christ. The boatman laid her out on a bench in the vaporetto waiting area when we docked and an ambulance soon arrived. Poor thing!

Back on San Marco, I strolled a while, losing and finding myself, in narrow streets clogged with tourists. Succumbed to hunger, went in a real restaurant on a whim for a sit-down meal and finally was able to try the legendary Venetian specialty dish -- I forget what it's called -- with fried sardines, onions, raisins and pinoli -- very good! Strolled a few hours more, came back to the hotel, showered, crashed for a nap, got dressed, went back to the piazza for sunset and a Bellini at Florian. Wonder of wonders! Roberto, the lazy-eyed accordionist of my 1995 visit, still plays in the ensemble. The musicians performed selections from The Magic Flute, Bolero and then something of Astor Piazzola's. I can't believe both Roberto and Piero are still in exactly the same places here in Venice as when I last saw them nine years ago!

Music in Venice: strange how sometimes people here stroll and sing a song out loud, un-selfconsciously. And there are the alleged singing gondoliers of myth and movies. I saw two old men strolling together after lunch, singing a song together.

If I were a millionaire I would want to live here in Venice -- or maybe on Lido? I understand why Peggy Guggenheim did. Everthing is simply so beautiful here, and so to my Goth tastes. And it seems Venetians know how to enjoy life.

Maybe tomorrow on the long train ride I'll remember all the other wonders that passed before my eyes today. Most striking: a little boy, a tourist, waved gaily to a kneeling beggar woman. I couldn't tell if she was a gypsy or a Muslim; her clothes were dark and old-fashioned and she wore a paisley head scarf. She kneeled, perfectly still, with one palm out.

Later: got into the shower, lathered up my hair and immediately begin to hear the pop of fireworks. Damn! There would be fireworks after the regatta on the Grand Canal just when I had soap in my hair and couldn't see them! I cannot believe I missed that sight!

+ + + + + + +

Got up at dawn and walked around Piazza San Marco and the Rialto in the early light. Saw where all the gondolas are lashed together and tarped down overnight. There was no one stirring so early except for the street-sweepers, who still sweep by hand with traditional long, bristled brooms that look like they're made out of bundles of twigs. I saw only a couple of ancient men walking little dogs at that hour. The night lights in the arcade around the piazza were still lit. I will never forget it -- the sea bathed in golden powder, the perfect, echoing silence of the square.

Milan (May, 2004)

2009-06-25T11:43:00.004-05:00

I was through customs at Malpensa (does that mean “bad thought,” like “bad idea?”) and on my way into town to Stazione Centrale by 9:30 a.m., having decided to go ahead and take care of my prenotazione for Venice and buying metro tickets as I arrived. Took a cab from Centrale to my hotel with a very friendly and flirtatious middle-aged driver who wanted to talk about Bush and why he is evil. My minimal Italian is further addled by lack of sleep, so my contribution consisted of lots of, “Si, si, certo.” I seem to start most sentences with dispiaci.

Very nice and handsome desk clerk said he was very pleased I was early and that he was happy to give me my room, a tiny one on the fourth floor, but one with a huge bathtub and windows that open over a pleasant pedestrianized area. I shook out my clothes and hung them up and got out of my wallowed-in airplane jeans and hung them in the window to air. Then I took a blessed long, cool bath, put on a fresh face, and struck out walking.

I’ve forgotten my way around Milano in the nine years since I last visited, so I just wandered aimlessly. First impression: Dio Mio! These Milanese are unbelievably stylish and gorgeous! The businessmen are swoon-worthy and the women look like porn stars or fashion models. Everything in the window displays is gorgeous and worth coveting.

Went to the Duomo, which is currently shrouded in scaffolding and wire mesh during its renovation. La Scala is also under renovation. Europe is totally falling apart!

Strolled the Vittorio Emanuele arcade (reputed to be the first shopping mall, but is that true? What about the passages in Paris?) and went in a bookstore with gorgeously designed paperback novels that would be so great for using to make art installations, Euro 7 each. Affordable, but no space in my luggage for them, since I travel with only a carry-on bag!

+ + + + + + +

I always feel really rattled trying to get dressed to go out in Italy because I’m used to being thought the resident style maven back home -- but I can’t hold a birthday cake candle to the Italians here. I’ll think I’m doing okay – blond hair gets head-turns and smiles – but I have to fight feeling inferior and less well put-together than the locals constantly. Heels are really not that bad to walk in here in Milan because of all the sidewalks. All the Milanese women seem to wear tall, pointy stilettos and are permanently attached at the ear to their cell phones. I love the fact that all these beautiful people are smoking all the time.

Food is always a problem. I refuse to use perfectly good shopping money to eat in sit-down restaurants. Plus, as a woman dining alone, I don’t particularly appreciate every single man who works in the kitchen or washes dishes feeling it's necessary that they come out and gawk at me or attempt to chat me up. At 6:00 p.m. I just grabbed a quick spinach focaccia from a bakery. Bar food is also a good option when it starts to be brought along automatically with aperitivos late in the afternoon. Lunch for me is usually a gelato.

The weirdest thing that happens to me here in Italy is guys in their twenties saying, “Ciao, bella,” to me as I pass them in the street. Back home, I’m invisible to young men and they never flirt with me. I really like the burst of male attention Italy provides, I must admit. It’s like a testosterone injection. My ego must need it, since I’m single and frequently feel unloved and undesired. Free hormone therapy!

Must fade now – falling asleep as I write.

+ + + + + + +

What a long day! It’s 8:15 p.m. now and I have been walking nearly constantly since 9:00 this morning. Let’s see if I can even remember it all.

Breakfast downstairs in a non-descript breakfast room in the basement. Coffee a little greenish, but tasted fine. Served by ancient, smiling waiter. Then to try to get my Vienna prenotazione at a nearby travel agency the desk clerk directed me to; no luck. Must go back to Stazione Centrale, the travel agent says. Sigh. I already know that’s not true because yesterday the station agent told me to wait and do it in Venice, or go to a travel agent. Makes me nervous. I’m such an American, wanting all these details nailed down days or weeks in advance.

Back to the Duomo to go inside this time. Saw a priest reading a newspaper while waiting in the confessional for someone to arrive who needed to confess. Saw the skeletal mummy of some saint or cardinal in a chapel crypt. Saw droves of Japanese tourists. Then, took off for the designer area as its boutiques opened. It takes my breath away just to see the names on the signs: Hermés, Prada, Gucci, Versace! Everything in the fashion area is elegantly understated and the streets are really little more than alleys with limited automobile traffic. Went to Sermoneta and bought Natasha pairs of pink and light blue fingerless kid gloves and me a pair of oxblood red driving gloves. Very, very beautiful gloves, available in every one of the crayons inside a 64-color Crayola box. I could spend a fortune there.

Window licked for a couple of hours, but lack the balls to go into designer ateliers, knowing I can’t buy. Looked for the ubiquitous Hermès scarf knock-offs I always try to snag in Europe. Found a good copy as a gift for my assistant. Came back to hotel to try to call my business contact at noon. I swear, I can never operate a hotel room phone in Italy properly. I don’t dial all those numbers quickly enough and so the line goes dead, or else my eardrums are assailed with various strange electronic beeps and flutter tones that I can't decipher.

After a short rest I set out again for the Ambrosiana. Some really nice late Gothic paintings there, and I find it unbelievable how those Renaissance painters managed to render cellulite on putti and made the whites of their eyes gleam! The collection was rather confusingly organized and all over the place historically, but interesting. The Caravaggio still life with grapes is probably the most famous painting there. When I was getting ready to leave the middle-aged museum guard came up to speak to me. He asked me, “Must you leave me so soon? My heart is breaking.” He made me laugh and we spoke in half-English, half-Italian. He inquired where I was from, refused to believe I was an American and said I had the face of an angel. In a second he had managed to get my hand into his. Then he kissed it in two places. I acted embarrassed and said, “Ciao! Grazia!” and left. Then, at the exit door, another museum guard called, “Goodbye, very beautiful lady” to me in Italian. See? This is how Italy and the States are so different. In the U.S. museum guards would get fired for harassing the public! I can’t complain, not at all. I’m not at all offended. I cannot believe what fans of women these Italian men are. And I don’t think for an instant they truly believe they are really going to get anywhere with all their funny flattery. It's just an accepted form of social interchange here.

After the Ambrosiana I just wandered and slowly became lost – sta bene – walking in alleys, looking up at lofts and flats. Found a district with plumbing supplies and drapery rods and tassels. Found what must once have been a castle, only walls now, windows boarded, grass growing on its roof. Milan actually does have some great residential streets with apartment buildings with grand architectural decorations. Stumbled upon Teatro Litta entirely by accident.

Walked back through Piazzo del Duomo late in the day and peopled watched. Came back to the hotel, took a long bath, dressed and headed to the bar next to the hotel for a Campari and free nibbles (chips, pistachios, open-faced sandwiches) to call dinner. A grandmother with her two grandchildren stopped in the bar and all the waiters came out to caress the face of the smaller one in his stroller. They tenderly stroked down his forehead to his cheeks, a sweet gesture I’ve never seen before. It was quite touching to me. I wonder if Italian fathers are commonly so loving and demonstrative?

I strolled around then and watched people rush for buses to go home from work. The downtown streets become fairly deserted by early evening, especially the banking district. The workers must live farther out, although I do see plenty of flats above storefronts and office spaces here in the central area of Milan.

I begin to see the Milanese style is not so much the clothes they wear but the way they put it all put together with shoes, bag, sunglasses and jacket. The clothes are really not so different from what’s available in the States, although perhaps Italians are more body-conscious. And the shoes! The high, pointy shoes!

+ + + + +

Woke up at 6:00 after having slept like a stone after all that walking. Went to the bar next door for cornetto and cappuccino before striking off to the metro to get to the neighborhood where I have a business appointment. Spent a pleasant day seeing the study abroad program quartered in Cadorna. Walked blocks to see student apartment accommodations scattered about, and at one point walked through a park with a public swimming pool where naked people lay outside tanning. Not just topless, but stark naked. And no waxing – au naturale. Yay!

Just at the time I was getting ready to depart, Roberto, the center’s director, blew in. He’s also director of a music academy so he invited me to hear a concert some of his students were giving at the Verdi Foundation, the space where Verdi’s buried in a crypt in the palazzo’s chapel with his lover. I accepted his invitation and we sped across town in rush-hour traffic in Roberto's Fiat. Fondazione Verdi: incredibly gorgeous music room, painted ceilings, arabesque motives on the glassed-in book shelves, illusionistic green painted draperies with gold leaf decorations, squeaky wood parquet floors and to-die-for lipstick red leather slipper chairs for the audience. Damn! These Italians know how to do everything visual right!

The concert was to benefit the retired La Scala musicians, who Roberto warned me are all old and deaf and often hum along or call out the mistakes of the musicians. We arrived late, in the middle of the second movement of a Beethoven concerto. I thought the young musicians were very competent and sounded great acoustically in the intimate hall. At the end, when the old man in front of me rose to leave, he turned and smiled at me and bowed.

Attending the lovely concert also gave me the opportunity to experience my first trip ever in a private car in Italy. I see how they do it now – they don’t really have a plan or know which streets connect or go where – they just try to get from Point A to Point B as the crow flies and see if they can get away with it -- all, of course, at high speed and barely stopping at intersections and traffic lights. No wonder it always seems as if you’re going to be run over here!

Oh! And I meant to write that yesterday in Via Spiga I gave a beggar a Euro because he played a beautiful, haunting melody on his melodica.

+ + + + + + +

I had the strangest dream just now before I awoke: that my mother was kissing my face tenderly with caresses of my head and face as I see Italians do with children, and she was murmuring sweet things to me. God! I hope she’s all right! I wonder what this means? How strange!

Up early and out, first to go back to the Duomo because I like to go in churches in the early morning when the real parishioners are praying. Then to take a photograph of La Scala’s renovation and the huge Versace billboard beside it. Then down Via Verdi toward the Brera, past all the bars and cafes and art supply stores catering to the art students. Then to the Brera, which was free because some kind of Italian Culture Week is going on. I stayed three hours or so, enjoying the Gothic and early Renaissance works with their pictorial flatness the most. I really only remember being struck by the Mantegna dead, foreshortened Christ last time I was at La Brera.

Then I hiked up to Castello Sforza. I am such an idiot. I thought I was lost, so I asked a flower seller, “Dovè castello?” and he points at the castle parapets visible just over the treetops. Duh. I evidently entered it at an entrance other than the main one with a moat and a drawbridge and the wheels and mechanisms and chains necessary to draw it up visible. I soaked my pounding feet in a fountain in the courtyard, then enjoyed looking around inside the castle. It’s like a fairy tale castle, huge, cool, with tiny windows up high. Explored a wonderful collection of antique musical instruments: virginals, piano forte, harpsichords and saw the piano Verdi used at some hotel he lived at and autographed. Violins, cellos, guitars, lutes, beautifully installed. Quickly browsed through ivory and ceramics collections.

On the way back to the hotel I went back to the shops behind Vittorio Emanuele to purchase those tiny weave, suntan-colored fishnet stockings Italian women wear in summer. Found a bargain: buy three pair, get two free! I’ll be fixed up for years to come!

Now I need to pack and prepare to depart for Venice tomorrow. It’s nearly goodbye again to Milan, and to all I saw here:

Tight white jackets over jeans on women;
impeccably tailored businessmen uninhibitedly picking their noses and scratching their crotches in public;
nuns picking their noses;
children in the Brera being taught about a genre painting while a really flagrant Magdalene displayed herself in all her naked glory on the wall opposite;
the Liberty of London Ianthe pattern upholstery on the couches in the lobby of my hotel;
exquisite marzipan fruits displayed in a shop window, wedding sweets in colored net bags with tiny flowers;
Missoni towels for sale in the department stores;
as many pairs of sunglasses per capita as churches;
young people wearing t-shirts with non-sensical English sayings emblazoned upon them: “bad party,” “1% attitude,” “horizontal boxer,” “true love = hot date with new man.”

New Orleans before Katrina (June, 2003)

2009-06-25T11:12:00.001-05:00

Road trip with my daughter and her college girlfriend, Austin to New Orleans.

Sunday: Houston, with my sister and her husband.

We finish our early dinner at 5:00 p.m., and on the way back to Gwen's house I inquire innocently if she's been to Galveston this season. Fishing. Yes, I am fishing, I admit it. I don't want to be locked up in the house for the evening so early. Gwen hasn't been to Galveston this year. I keep fishing. What time does the sun set these days on the Gulf? Oh, nine-ish. Well, what if I drove us all out to Galveston in the rental car to see the sunset? Gwen loves this idea. The girls are cheering from the back seat. Mike is planning to watch the Hitler mini-series, so he has no objections at all. I suspect he's exhausted from all the girl-chatter, anyway. When we arrive at Gwen's, the girls go to change into their swimsuits. Gwen suggests instead of taking the rental car, we drive her birthday present instead: her brand-new silver Mustang. She actually seems overjoyed at this opportunity.

She kisses Mike good-bye as he watches television, we jump in the Mustang, and off we go for Galveston. It's only 35 miles away, and we speed down the Sunday-evening-empty freeway to get there. I love Galveston; it's one of my favorite cities. As most English majors know from reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening, it's a city much like New Orleans -- a Spanish/French Creole shipping harbor, and the site of many a fabulous Victorian mansion and Italianate villa before the hurricane of 1910 wiped most of it out -- and when part of the island, like Atlantis, took its mansions and villas and inhabitants and went under the ocean forever. I believe it was about 1800 people who perished.

Galveston is, to this day, incredibly Goth and romantic and tragic and haunted. A section just as you drive into the city was spared, so there are still a few rusted, decayed, incredible mansions and villas to be drunk in visually before one hits the ocean wall.

We find a parking place easily, on a Sunday evening, and Cari and Natasha tear towards the beach. The sky is blue and cloudless, the ocean is surprisingly blue and clean -- early in the season! -- and the waves are high. Gulls cry overhead. Gwen and I watch and laugh as the girls shed clothes and shoes and charge into the surf. It's clear my innocent sister doesn't understand the nature of the girls' relationship. It's so romantic to me to see them hold hands and charge off into the ocean. They swim far out, as Gwen and I roll up our pants' legs and test the surf with our bare feet and beach comb for shells and chat. I look out to sea watchfully and spot their two heads, the long-haired Naiads. I see they are holding hands and diving underwater, like two playful young dolphins. I see they are taking turns bearing up each other's head while floating with eyes closed, weightless and totally trusting. It makes me tear up with happiness. They are so much in love and this moment must be terribly romantic for them. It's one of those moments for me when I feel like that dishonored Countess in Willa Cather's The Age of Innocence -- you know, the one Michelle Pfeiffer played in the movie version. I feel terribly worldly and a kind of poignant tenderness for them and for their young, very young love.

I look into my sister's face to see if she understands and is correctly interpreting the relationship of the girls, but I see she doesn't comprehend. Too bad. It's a moment I wish I could share with her in my life as a mother, since it's something so important about her only niece. But I can't say anything; the girls' relationship is a private matter. Their young love, how I feel at this moment, the tide, the sunset -- it's all much too fragile for words.

In time, Natasha emerges from the surf like Venus and trots toward Gwen and me. Natasha's white-fleshed like a peach, voluptuous and splendid, and her love, dark, Sicilian Cari, trails in her wake. I give them the shells I've found for them. By now the sun's starting to go down, and they're tired from fighting the ocean; they swam a long way out, past the end of the jetties. Natasha's spied a cheap tourist trap, housed in what was once a clapboard changing-house on a long narrow pier. As usual, she wants to shop for cheap plastic treasures. Her aunt is entirely amenable to this suggestion, and Cari and I trail behind them. They're in heaven as they examine miniature plastic cameras containing slides views of Galveston, dead baby sharks in bottles of blue water, sea dollars, plastic squeaking fish, purses made of coconuts, rude t-shirts, and the like.

I purchase only four postcards that reproduce the scene of the beach we've just come from after the protective sea wall was erected in an attempt to save Galveston from future hurricane devastation. Ladies in long puffy white dresses and children in black stockings promenade. I love Galveston; it's inherently so sad, and the closest thing to Venice the South has to offer.

We speed back to Houston so the girls can wash the salt out of their hair, and soon it's nearly 10 o'clock and all of us are sleepy. The girls say their good-nights and retreat to the guest room. Mike watches the Hitler mini-series on the television in his office. Gwen takes each of the dogs out its separate entrance to do its doggie business, then says good-night and heads for the master bedroom. I step outside to smoke the last cigarette of the day.

And then, I hunker down in the living room on a couch in front of the huge t.v., and I drift off to sleep to some old black-and-white movie I've seen a hundred times before, with the volume set on "mute."

Monday morning: Houston to New Orleans

As agreed, Gwen whispers, "Rachel," and wakes me at 6:45 a.m. so I can attempt to wake the girls (who are hard sleepers) and we can get on the road to New Orleans early. Mike's sitting at the breakfast table, crunching cereal as he reads the morning paper. I make a visit to the bathroom, and see upon rising from the toilet that the water's bright red. Shit! This is what I hate about menopause. I never know when, or if, anymore, I'll get my period. Unexpected bathroom complication has got to be my least favorite road-trip occurrence. Oh, well.

I tap on the girls' bedroom door, and hear Natasha respond sleepily. I peep inside: they're tangled in each other's arms like eels. I guess they're still so early in the stages of love that they cannot bear to lose touch with one another, even in their sleep. I tell them they have to get up so we can get going. They sit up like tousle-haired zombies. I go to get dressed myself, and check on them again afterward. I hear water running in the guest-room shower. Good.

Mike's soon off on his morning commute, Gwen brings a can of unopened coffee and a bottle of water to me, and I start up the coffee maker. Eventually the girls appear, dressed, and begin to examine the breakfast possibilities Gwen's set out. Cereal or cookies, and juice boxes. They opt for cookies. I sit out on the patio with the Helen Keller dog, who licks at my toes while I smoke cigarettes and drink coffee until I'm sufficiently awake to marshal the girls to load their things into the car. I have my MapQuest directions to guide us into New Orleans. Gwen and I embrace to say our good-byes, and she shoves two crisp $100 bills into my hand, saying, "I'm going to pull a 'Mother' on you. This is for Natasha and you to go to the Brass Lion to get yourselves something." (The Brass Lion is a shop on Royal in New Orleans that specializes in estate and reproduction antique jewelry.) "I always feel guilty that I can acquire a new piece when I go there, but you and Natasha are deprived." Well! Our mother didn't raise me to be a fool, so I gratefully accept. This pleases Gwen very much. She is so very, very sweet.

The trip from Gwen's house to the Interstate highway is smooth, even in the rush-hour traffic. Gwen's warned me about some gigantic bridge we have to cross to head toward Beaumont; she says it's so frightening she has to call Mike or her sister-in-law on the cell phone when she has to drive on it. We hit the bridge eventually, but it's not that scary -- it's euphoric. You drive up and up and up like the ascent of a roller-coaster, like you're on a conveyor belt to heaven. After you crest, it's a fun ride down, and there are tall concrete blinders to make it impossible to see off the side into the ship channel below. What you don't know won't hurt you, I guess, was the builder's philosophy. After the bridge, it's a straight and easy drive to the Louisiana border.

Once we're well into Louisiana, we hit the first of two long causeways we'll take to New Orleans. The girls are fascinated with seeing Spanish-moss draped tree-tops at road-level, and love the fact that it's thirty miles of "No Stopping Permitted" on the causeways. They speculate about the number and the ferocity of the alligators in the swamps below the roadway, and about the depraved Cajun sodomites living on the bayous. From time to time we see cranes and other exotic birds fly up. I give the girls a little history lecture about the days of the Kingfish, Huey P. Long, and the WPA and how you used to have to take the long land route around, or else use cigarette boats pushed with a pole to navigate the swamps to get to New Orleans. We get to Lafayette about noon, and stop at a super-Walmart for me to do my bathroom business. The girls shop for a snack, and eventually emerge with a bag of Zapp's Crawtators -- a local crawfish-flavored potato chips. I wait by the car for them, smoking. I see the people have already changed since Texas. Now the vast majority of the populace of the Walmart parking lot is the color of Sugar Babies candy, and they are already moving with the slow, authoritative Louisiana saunter.

We pass through Baton Rouge next and I ask Natasha if she remembers her French. She doesn't, obviously, since she makes a few wrong essays at translation. "Red stick!" I shout. "I'm gonna beat you like a mouton with a red stick!" I yell, laughing, to refresh her memory on the origin of this town's name. We're over the second causeway now, and I'm starting to get excited. New Orleans is one scant hour from Baton Rouge. The skies have darkened as we've speeded along. We're on the final leg of the journey, past Metaire and about even with the New Orleans airport, when the sky opens up and a torrential rain begins to pour down. We don't know how to operate the rented car's windshield wipers, so they're going one speed, which is so slow it's worthless. I have my nose to the fogged-up windshield, the traffic's suddenly bumper-to-bumper, and we can no longer read the overhead highway signs in the deluge. I keep messing with the wipers until I accidentally do something that makes them beat at a faster tempo, and then I see our exit sign looming overhead and have to screech across two lanes of traffic. The visibility has been so low that Cari has been deprived of her first thrilling sight of St. Louis Cemeteries Nos. 1 and 2, with their signature above-ground "oven" graves, on our way in. We make it off the freeway at our exit and find ourselves in a flooded intersection on Elysian Fields. Natasha screams, "I don't want to get stalled out in a car in this neighborhood!" I scream back, "Shut up! I'll drive on the neutral ground if I have to! Do you think I want a flooded car myself?" I keep driving for what seems like miles, but I'm still not seeing my cross-street. I throw a city map at Cari in the back seat, and tell Natasha to start reading cross-street names out to Cari as I continue driving so we won't stall out in the water, so that I can perhaps tell how much farther we have to go, or if I've already missed our street. Natasha's fractured French would be funny, if the situation weren't so dire. She's calling out things like "Deerailers," and I'm saying, "What the fuck? D-e-r-e-i-l-l-e-u-r-s, perhaps?" It's comical, but I am very, very tense, the street is flooded, and, by the looks of the houses, Stella and Stanley's old neighborhood has "gone down" even considerably more than it was back in their day. I have never even heard of these street names. Finally Natasha reads aloud, "Charters." "Chartres!" I shriek triumphantly. We're in the Quarter, and from here on out we are no longer lost. A couple of turns and we're in the loading zone out front of our hot-coral and dusty-blue Faubourg Marigny hotel. Just as suddenly as it all started, the rain stops. I tell the girls to start grabbing stuff out of the trunk, and go inside to check us into the hotel.

The large man working the front desk has deep-set, sleepy Creole eyes. He's non-plussed about the rain and lazily takes my credit card impression and hands me the keys to our room. The hotel has dark rose-painted walls, and is furnished tastefully with antiques; a portrait of Napoleon hangs over the free-breakfast dining table. I go up a narrow staircase and out the second-floor arcade and find our room, overlooking the hotel's swimming pool. Our room has both shuttered and French doors, and it's interior is painted a deep, eggplant purple. It's little, but the beds are fine and what furniture there is, is antique. Back in Creole days, this room at the back of the house would have probably have been reserved for the ladies' maid, or the quadroon children's governess. I meet the girls in the lobby and direct them up, we unload everything into the room, I move the car to the parking lot around back and lock it up. I meet the girls out front of the hotel, then we're off to our first day of New Orleans. The sun's come out, and the humidity is 100% after the rain. Steam rises off the brick streets.

We tear off across Esplanade past where some movie's shooting into the Quarter proper to Central Grocery, which closes at 4:00 p.m.. I have been dreaming of my muffaletta for weeks, and I am not just about to wait another day for it. It's so long past lunch that there's hardly anyone in the neighborhood Italian grocery store, so we get our half mufalettas and our icy bottled root beers and head back to the counter and its stools to consume them. Heaven. Now, with a mouthful of olive salad and salami, I feel I have truly arrived in New Orleans. Cari, being an Italian, loves this grocery store with its high, dusty shelves of attractive tins of Italian tomatoes, bottled olive oil, all varieties of olives in glass jars, leftover pannetone from Christmas past, hard candies, Limonetta and so forth; I point out the foil festooned whole prosciuttos hanging like decorations. On the way out she notices an obscure Italian indigestion patent medicine behind the cash register and buys a box as a present for her father, who complains he cannot find it in Austin.

Then, we're off on a pedestrian tour. It's fun having Cari with us, since Natasha and I get to show all our favorite places to someone who's never seen them before. We walk down Decatur past Cafe Du Monde and enter Jackson Square; I point out the equestrian statue, the strangely Disneyland-castle silhouette of the cathedral, the beautiful iron balconies of the Pontalba apartments. Then, we cross Decatur, past the rows of waiting horse- and mule-drawn Hansom cabs, and climb some stairs to look out on the great, rolling, muddy Mississippi. One of the grand old paddle showboats, the Natchez, is pulled up at the pier debarking passengers. This spot, like the pier off Piazza San Marco in Venice, gives me the willies and makes me jangly-excited. I imagine all the ships that have moored here, and all the incredible exotic goods that have been unloaded at this spot: the parrots, the coffee and spices, the Parisian fashions, the Turkish rugs, the Italian chandeliers. And I cannot help but think, even when I try not to, of the unwilling human cargo also unloaded on this spot -- the Carribean and African slaves who built this new world by their labor on the nearby plantations, the Irish indentured servants who came to dig the canals and soon died in droves of yellow fever. I think this spot must be one of the most karmically loaded places in the South.

I tell the girls we now must make a slow promenade around Jackson Square to the cathedral, as ladies of good breeding would certainly have done two hundred years ago, and go into the church to say a prayer of thanks for our arrival in New Orleans while we light a candle. This we do. The heat of the candles in their wrought iron stands rises up in visible, oppressive waves; I can only imagine how many covered-up and tightly-corseted ladies must have keeled over from the heat during Mass in August a hundred years ago. Cari dips her fingers in holy water and genuflects as we leave. I tell her, "Good. Now you can tell your mother you went to Mass in New Orleans and it will only be lying a little!"

And then, we just start walking. These forty or so square blocks are all magical and each has something unique to offer, so I give Cari the crash-course in doing the French Quarter: "Don't focus on the first floors of the buildings since most of them house only commercial tourist shops. Keep your chin up, and look at each building from the second floor balcony to its roof. As in Paris, these are the floors in which people live. There! See? You've time-traveled two hundred years just by never looking out at eye-level if you can help it." And I begin the tradition that will hold for the rest of our journey: I lead, and the girls follow hand-in-hand behind me.

We comb the streets of the Quarter in a grid pattern and gawk at architecture for about an hour; by then, rush hour has passed, and I suggest we take the St. Charles streetcar out to the Garden District and back. We cross Canal and wait only a moment before the streetcar arrives. It's less than half-full, so both the girls and I get window seats, which we open so that we can hang our elbows and hair out during the ride, as the native commuters do. I love this ride. At first, you skirt the comparatively modern skyscrapers of the business district, but after the car curves around the monument to General Lee, you find yourself bumping along in the lower Garden District, with its once fine store-fronts. We pass Delmonico's. Shit! It's been painted ochre and now sports a gold sign proclaiming "Emeril's Delmonico's." That bastard! Hasn't he made enough off blackening every conceivable grocery item on his t.v. cooking empire? There are hundred-year-old florists and bridal shops in this neighborhood, and a few signs of modern gentrification such as coffee houses and Rite-Aid drug stores. In a few moments you're in the upper Garden District, with its beautiful antebellum columned mansions, built by the Protestant Anglo bankers and merchants who moved to town once the original Latin inhabitants of New Orleans had lain its infrastructure (in other words, after a hundred or so years of hard work had already been done). These homes are mainly ancestral; there are no realtor signs visible, ever, in this neighborhood. Some of the houses have seen better days and need paint and a manicure, but they all stand bravely shoulder-to-shoulder and face the streetcar. There are many Protestant churches on either side of the street, and a synagogue. We pass Loyola and its next-door neighbor, Tulane; both sit directly across from Audubon park. It's early evening now, and it's the best time to be clacking along the tracks as the sun's rays grow gentle and slant down in a golden glow. Many inhabitants of the neighborhood jog with their dogs on leashes alongside the streetcar tracks. A few tired uniformed maids get on at various stops on their way home, and it's obvious the tempo of the day is slowing down now.

After you pass Tulane there are a few blocks with scattered two or three-storey apartment homes built at the turn of the century through the 1920's. I love these little four- and eight-plex compounds with their central patios and balconies and ornately grilled windows and railings. I can imagine living in one of them during the 'Twenties and throwing wild parties, while my Victrola blared jazz out into the night. Tarantula Arms, anyone? One of the reasons I love New Orleans so much is the stories the buildings tell; a run-down, empty apartment building can hold frozen ghosts in its windows that whisper whole novels to me.

At the end of the night the driver tells everyone to debark. Sometimes the driver will then switch all the seats to reverse and face the other end of the car, and he'll walk down to take the controls at the other end. Tonight, there's another inbound streetcar waiting for us, so we simply get off and get on it to head back to Canal Street. A grizzled elderly man who I noticed talking the arm off of a poor, sweet thing on the first leg of the journey plops down next to me. He says, "I notice that you have some stamps." I assume he refers to my tattoos. I don't want to talk, I want to look out the window, so I say, "Yeah." He offers, "I have one I got fifty years ago when I was in the Navy." (Every word he says is letting me hear more of an accent that identifies the speaker as, probably, a resident of Milwaukee, or its environs.) He rolls up his sleeve to show me the ancient, flattened image of a fuzzy anchor. I lie and say, "That's nice," and turn back to my window view. I can sense his disappointment -- it's palpable -- and I feel guilty because he's obviously on vacation all alone, he's old, and he's lonely. Well, he's wrong. I am not a nice Southern lady. May I burn in hell, but I want to drink in my own private streetcar ride with my greedy eyes.

Eventually the streetcar bumps to its terminal stop at Canal and the girls and I quickly debark. I wish the old sailor an over-the-shoulder "Happy vacation!" quickly as we go down the steps, then I hurry the girls across the street so we can escape him. I don't want to have to entertain or be entertained by this poor old fellow even through one drink. The girls are like flushed and sweaty roses from the ride, and they say they're thirsty. I remember I have those two crisp $100 bills in my purse that Gwen has given me to spend on jewelry. I announce, "We're headed for cocktails!" and blaze the way to Bourbon Street. We're momentarily slowed down at the tawdry front end of Bourbon, where the hookers (Oh! Excuse me! I mean "dancers and entertainers"!) stand in doorways and hawk themselves, by a window display at the Unisex Club of photos of people of various genders, races and numbers performing gymnastic live sex acts. A second window display offers the tantalizing prospect of selecting the dirty girl of one's choice and washing her publicly.

Eventually we get to the Bourbon Street entrance of the Court of the Two Sisters; the restaurant has entrances on two different streets, since it takes up most of a block, but the kind maitre d' allows us to cross through the dining area in air conditioning to get to the cocktail bar. Waiters are setting tables in the greenhouse-like dining patio with its live bougainvillea trees and lighting twinkling candles. No one's yet in the bar, so we take a seat at a small round table for three, underneath one of the taxidermied parrots. (The parrots, when living, were residents of the restaurant for a century; in death, they remain as perpetual sentinels.) In a moment a stately, elderly, mustachioed Creole approaches in his long Parisian waiter's apron. "Good evening, ladies. Will you be having cocktails with us tonight?" he asks, bowing.

I say, "A mint julep, please. I've been craving one all afternoon." He bows and turns to Natasha. "A Ramos gin fizz," she orders, not missing a beat. Cari's next, but she's looking around, confused; I can tell she needs guidance about the Cocktails of New Orleans. I say, "Honey, why don't you have a claret lemonade? They're so refreshing, and they're the specialty of the house." She accepts my suggestion, and the waiter departs to have our drinks compounded at the bar. The air conditioning is set at arctic temperature, and the bar is dark and woody. After about five minutes our drinks arrive, complete with elaborate fruit garnish and napkins and swizzle sticks with two Southern Belles represented thereon. The mint in my julep tickles my nose as I draw the divine elixir up the short straw and into my mouth. I'm in paradise. Bourbon is exactly what's needed in the summer in New Orleans. We're close enough to the swinging louvered kitchen doors to observe bits of action inside. Tall, strong black men in full chef's attire and high toques dump boiling water out of caldrons full of shrimp, and clouds of steam rise. Natasha and I speculate on the army of labor needed to make the city's famous cuisine possible. Just think, for instance, of the hundreds of thousands of oysters alone that must be shucked daily to feed a city of such ravenous appetites!

We finish our lovely, lovely tall icy cocktails and the waiter delivers the bill. $25 with tip. Good. Looks like we can drink all night on my jewelry money. We wish the waiter a good evening, and head past the Charm Gate back into the street, which is now dark, and back to prowling the street. Natasha wants to buy a rude t-shirt, and there are plenty of stores that sell them on Bourbon Street. She is particularly taken with one that reads, "Suck me, shuck me, eat me raw." Cari and I beg her not to buy one. She's torn, because she also likes the shirt that proclaims the wearer to be a "Certified Bourbon Street Breast Inspector." While Natasha ogles t-shirts, I'm able to find some nice retro photographic postcards.

We resume our stroll, and hear screaming overhead from a balcony. Cute Goth girls three floors up pelt us with black and silver Mardi Gras beads (in June!), and wave and gesture for us to come up. The street noise is fairly loud, so we can only scream, "Thank you!" while we pick up the beads. I make a Charlie Chaplin shrugging gesture up to them, then pantomime walking on down the street with two fingers. We throw them kisses and proceed.

At the end of Bourbon is my favorite bar, Lafitte's Blacksmith Bar. It has no electric lights, so is dark as a pit once the sun goes down and is lighted only by candles. We get a high table adjacent to the grand piano bar, where an elderly man is setting his microphone levels. A waiter comes to take our order -- White Russians for the girls, a Jack Daniels and Coke ("Jackson Coke") for me. The piano bar singer is wonderful. He has the gin-and-cigarette roughened voice of Louis Armstrong, and his choice of songs is perfect. He starts off with, "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone," a song I really love. Natasha and Cari hold hands. When he finishes, he looks over at me and asks, "Where are you lovely ladies from?" I say, "Austin, Texas," as I rise to go over to the piano. I ask if I can make a request, and he says, "You know you can." I say, "I know you must do a wonderful version of 'Summertime.' Would you play it for me?" He says, "I'd love to," and I put $5 in his tip jar and return to my seat. He does a killer version of it, with a long, fabulous piano intro. Lord, it's perfect. Sitting in Lafitte's on a hot summer night, with this melody and these words I love so much wafting out into the brick cobbled streets, as a Hansom cab clops by. It's exactly, exactly what I wanted.

We enjoy the wonderful music and then the girls complain of hunger. Since I had the muffaletta at 4:00 p.m. I'm done with eating for the day, but the girls are like baby birds and squawk to be fed more frequently. We go up a few steps to the Clover Grill diner.

Looks like it's been a hard night at the Clover. None of the tables has been bussed, there's only a cook and one poor waiter working, and the counter is shoulder-to-shoulder diners. I bus a table for us, and we sit and wait. Eventually the "Clever Girl," the very handsome, tattooed and pierced waiter (with gorgeous, huge hands) comes and squats beside the table with his order pad, obviously exhausted. He apologizes for the delay, and we tell him it's fine. The girls order breakfast and I get coffee. Cari needs to pee, and she needs to pee bad. The waiter tells her if she doesn't mind that the sign says "Men," there's a restroom out back. Neither Natasha nor I has ever been to the restroom at the Clover. When Cari comes back, she reports it was a Porta-Potty in a dark alleyway where men from the neighboring leather bar were having sex. Natasha's horrified and says she should have offered to escort Cari. Cari seems fairly non-plussed. The food arrives, and the girls wolf it down. It's now near midnight.

We flirted with the idea, earlier in the evening, of visiting Preservation Hall tonight, since Cari's a jazz aficionado and Monday night should be less crowded than later in the week. We've cruised the exterior earlier in the evening, but the line waiting to get in was long. Now, fortified with food, the girls decide they can venture back to Preservation Hall. There's no wait so late in the evening, and the venerable musicians are winding down with their final three sets. It's standing room only, but, at the next break, I yell "Mosh pit!" to the girls, and they crash through the crowd of standing tourists with me to grab recently-vacated floor spaces at the musicians' feet. The way it works at Preservation Hall is there are three rows of hard wooden benches, and behind that point, everyone stands. There are no lights in the room except where the musicians play, and I hate to stand in the rear, blocked by tall men, in total darkness. There are old couch cushions on the floor in front of the first row of benches, and this is where the truly brave, brazen, or crazy-about-jazz people sit. One's in danger here, of being inadvertently spit on by the musicians, or nailed by the slide of the trombone, but it's my favorite spot. The musicians soon end their short break and file in a take their places. Tonight, we've got a trombone player about my age, an ancient, natty, finger-waved-hairstyle trumpet player, a 50-something Marsalis-family-looking tenor sax player, a white and white-haired showboat banjo player, a European piano player with a name full of consonants (Polish?) in his 30's, a Louis-Armstrong-like, animated, comical stand-up bass player, and an elderly Black or Cuban drummer. The Preservation Hall musicians are all session players: that is, the band comes together anew and in differing combinations each night from a roster of musicians who have made the cut as far as their proficiency as players and their knowledge of jazz and blues go. It's jazz improvisation in spirit, for real, as the musicians simply show up at 8 each night, shake hands, sit down, and begin to jam. There is no set list, and they do take spontaneous requests. Sitting next to me on the floor are two Japanese tourists; they're college-age kids, with Spinal Tap rocker hair-cuts. They are totally grooving on the Preservation Hall experience, but I cannot help but notice they have absolutely no sense of rhythm as they tap and rock along with the music.

Another reason I love sitting on the floor is the music resonates through the building's ancient floor boards. I put my palms down, and the bass and drums travels up into my arms through vibration. I feel how the "thump" would have urged one to dance to this same music in the brothels of Storyville a hundred years ago.

And then, during the last set of the night, without my requesting it, the ancient trumpet player starts the first slow, wailing, melancholy notes of "St. James Infirmary." I'm in heaven! Again, I have gotten exactly what I wanted from New Orleans. The band's in fine form, and the song is sublime. What more could I possibly, possibly want?

Then, finally, as is the tradition, the musicians end the night with "When the Saints Go Marching In." They file out, and Natasha and Cari and I stand up stiffly and stretch. It's been a long, long day from Houston to New Orleans, and now we're tired.

We hoof it back down to Decatur and cross Esplanade to our hotel. The movie people are still hard at work filming. The street's still active with neighborhood people coming and going from the Quarter. The guidebooks say not to chance it, to take a cab into Faubourg Marigny this late at night. The girls feel fine about walking, and I feel safe, too -- like we're in some magical kind of state of Grace. We soon arrive at our hotel, I unlock the lace-curtained French door, the girls fall onto their bed exhausted, and we all decide to shower in the morning. I set the alarm for 7 a.m., crawl into my little twin bed, and we all fall instantly and blissfully to sleep.

Wednesday: New Orleans

The alarm goes off at 7 a.m., and I hear the patter of rain on the roof. Merde! How can it be, when we are working against the clock for our last few glorious hours in New Orleans, and then I face the long, anti-climatic drive back to Houston? I decide to do my bathroom business and dress, not waking the girls, until I can check the television weather forecast and the skies. I step out into the arcade and see the rain's not torrential. The local television radar shows a storm passing overhead, and it's forecast to pass New Orleans within a couple of hours, moving East. Good. I take the opportunity to quietly pack all my stuff, and organize what I can of the girls' before waking them. I tell them to wake up, it's raining, we have to make plans. They sleepily get up and get dressed, find their scattered belongings, and pack up. I suggest for the sake of efficiency they breakfast downstairs this morning, so we go down together to the dining room. Carafes of strong, hot, chicory-laced coffee stand waiting, along with orange juice, and a tray of fresh croissants. This sight pleases them, and their spirits rise a little. After I've had my coffee, I, too, feel more optimistic.

By 8:45 the rain's let up. We head up Conti to St. Louis No. 1, which opens at 9. I don't expect there to be many other visitors so early after opening on a rainy morning, but, wouldn't you know it? The ubiquitous middle-aged blond "occultist" in flowing black clothing is standing smack in front of the "alleged" grave of Marie LeVeau, talking into a documentary camera. I tell the girls to skirt that action, that we'll go deeper into the cemetery and return later to the front. Natasha and Cari are soon clicking away with their cameras. Actually, the overcast rainy morning is ideal for photographing a New Orleans cemetery, so things are turning out for the best momentarily. We're soon all scattered in three directions, following our intuitions and making photographs.

We drift together again toward the Treme tenement-side of the cemetery, where we hear a woman's voice from the projects shrieking, "Put the motherfucker down! I mean it! Put it down now!" and then a blood-curdling scream. I tell the girls, "Great! Now we are going to get hit by stray bullets coming from someone's kitchen." We hustle deeper into the cemetery, away from the wrought-iron open-work gate. I wonder idly if we should call the police on one of the girls' cell phones, but then decide I should probably just butt out, since I have no idea from which of the many apartments the woman's scream has issued. And I haven't heard any gunshots, although knives are, admittedly, silent. We're soon lost again in our photographing. We try Marie LeVeau's "official" grave again, and the occultist and video crew are gone. I expose my tattoos and pose for photos by Natasha. Then, a couple of elderly French women, probably Parisians, judging by the accents I can't help but overhear and their clothes, stumble by. They are trying to figure out what we're doing, and they stare quizzically at all last night's offerings left at the grave (pennies, shells, gum, rum bottles, candle stubs) and at the triple-X markings and scratchings on the crypt itself. I offer helpfully, "C'est le tombeau du voudoo reine Marie LeVeau -- le tombeau officiel." They understand me, and nod their thanks. Still crouching and posing for the photo Natasha's trying to make, I point a few graves over and say, "Le voici, le tombeau actuel de Marie LeVeau." They smile and wander off in the direction I've pointed.

We wander to the rear of the cemetery, where the back wall holds the common "community" crypts -- the ones that are rentals and not maintained "in perpetuity." I know I've mentioned the Napoleonic Code repeatedly now, and this is a startling example of how Louisiana differs in its laws from the other forty-nine states. One's deceased relatives can actually be evicted from rented graves here, just as they can be in Italy. Wonder of wonders, photo op of photo ops! Two side-by-side upper crypts have been emptied and recently cleaned and replastered. Of course, Natasha and Cari want to get inside them to have photos made. I tell them they are going to have to give each other a leg-up to scale the high wall to get in, but if they can manage it, I'll take the picture. I meter the camera, then tell them to start trying. At just the time they've lept up, balanced on their hip bones on the crypt ledges and are attempting to wriggle into the narrow crypts, the two Parisian matrons round the corner. Now they REALLY don't know what to make of us. One smiles weakly and tries an attempt at humor. She says in French, "Better tell them once they get in, there's no getting out again." And I say, "Oui, mais elles vourraient seulement un photo de les derrieres." This cracks both of the ladies up, and they walk away laughing, shaking their heads, and muttering, "Les derrieres!" They will probably return to France and tell their friends that the New World French are all grave-robbing Voodooists.

Just about this time we hear again from the Treme side, "Put the motherfucker down! Better put it down now!" and then the blood-curdling scream. The French ladies high-tail it out of the cemetery. I decide then it's all a plot by some prankster over in the tenement. I think she looks out her third-floor window because she's bored, and when she sees the cemetery's empty except for a couple of white tourists deep within, she does this just to freak them out, for her amusement.

When we've shot up all our film, we head back to the Quarter for last-minute shopping. Natasha cannot leave town without purchasing a black baseball cap with the silhouette of a woman leaning against the Bourbon Street signpost and the caption, "Stolen from a Bourbon Street Whore House." Cari and I consider ourselves lucky, on the relative scale of Natasha's proclivity for rude merchandise. We duck into the Italian grocery and purchase a jar of olive salad for Gwen, and a box of beignet mix. We make a quick razoo through the flea market end of the French Market.

We make it back to the hotel at 11:45 a.m. and we all go upstairs to make one last bathroom stop. My period coming unexpectedly has not actually been such an inconvenience, I decide. I think to myself that I enjoy bleeding in strange cities; by doing so, I leave a part of myself there always, and become a kind of blood sister to the city. First Venice, now New Orleans. We check out, but since we're in a pay-to-park lot, the slow, sleepy-eyed hotel clerk agrees we can just stay parked and continue to do what we want to do, and he'll still reimburse me for my parking fee when we finally leave. Natasha suggests we go have lunch before we depart at Praline Connection, a soul food place we've eaten at on previous vacations, so we strike off. When we arrive, I remember it's graduation time. A couple of families sit at the long ten-top tables in the restaurant's center with teenagers wearing mortar boards and playing with the tassels. Obviously, they're out to a celebratory lunch with the extended families. Our teen-aged waiter, in starched and ironed white shirt, brings menus and sweet iced tea. Natasha orders an oyster poor boy, Cari orders only potato salad, and I order turnip greens and cornbread. When our food comes, Natasha picks the oysters out and consumes them without the sandwich trappings. I ask, "What the heck?" and she replies, "Well, you can't really expect me to leave New Orleans without eating oysters, can you?"

There's really nothing else any of us wants to do, so we face the inevitable and return to the car, pay the parking fee, drive round the block and Natasha runs into the hotel to get reimbursement. And then, once again, it's Good-bye, New Orleans. It always makes me so melancholy to leave. I love this sad, painted, decaying whore of a city, with all its maddening complexity. This town and I dance a tango with each other; she's my soul-sister. She knows all about me, what I want, what I need, what I envy, what I fear. She sees all, knows all, accepts all -- and she always has. The upper-storey windows of her grand buildings hold captive the reflections of the ghosts of a million octoroon balls and stories; more stories, perhaps, than do her famous above-ground cemeteries. And always, always beside her, Old Man River, he just keeps rolling along.

"Roots" Road Trip with my Daughter to Celebrate her Graduation from High School (June, 2002)

2009-06-25T11:10:00.003-05:00

Day 1, Austin to Abilene, Texas.

Picked up rental car -- woo-hoo! Two hot chicks in a low, fast car -- our usual ride is a high wheel-base Explorer. Dropped off our two very confused and concerned Boston terriers with my best friend, then hit the road. Arrived in Brownwood at about 3:00 p.m., just in time to hit Underwood's Barbeque for ribs when the lunch line had died down. Consumed melting-from-the-bone, finger-licking ribs, heavenly cold cole slaw and potato salad, home-made warm yeast rolls, sweet ice tea -- if you ever find yourself in Texas, it is well worth even a four-hour detour to sample this legendary barbeque, thought by many to be the very best in our whole huge state! Made it to Abilene to my mother's house by early evening in light rain, and went to bed early, after enjoying seeing the latest of her artistic creations, her gorgeous quilts, and watching the long-range weather forecast on television.

Day 2, Abilene to the Panhandle.

Struck off early in light rain. Dazzled by the sight of miles and miles of tall white modernist windmills, installed high on a bluff outside Sweetwater to generate electricity. The landscape begins to change as one drives north and crosses the Llano Estacado. My 18-year-old daughter has never seen this landscape, and is struck immediately by the plain flat land with its red soil, the color of a flower pot, and the huge sky overhanging it. We outrun the rain by Lubbock, and head into a huge blue sky dotted with little puffy clouds. There are only three categories of sights in the Texas Panhandle. The first: flat, red dirt fields with their plowed rows (no crops to be seen this time of year), and melancholy, deserted, weathered or collapsing wooden farm houses. The second: huge, menacing grain elevators like something from a deChirico painting (that filled us with a comical and unexpected sense of dread). The third: geometric oil storage tanks and pump jacks, working endlessly on the horizon like possessed rocking horses ridden by ghostly, invisible children. The only variation on these three scenes is the inclusion or absence of a few cows or horses wandering around vacantly.

We arrived at Canyon, the first of three of my childhood hometowns we were to visit, in early afternoon, and unbidden tears filled my eyes as we passed first my old church and then the Mayberry-like town square with its brick court house and ubiquitous statue of a fallen Confederate soldier. I had not seen this little town since I was thirteen. I drove my daughter by the two rented houses in which we'd lived, and was relieved to see the brick streets where I once rode my bicycle were still, blessedly, largely unchanged. On our way out of town, we stopped to take quick photos under a three-story high concrete cowboy that once marked a roadside Stuckey's.

Then, we got back on the road to drive the fifty miles to my original and true home town. Our journey took us through Amarillo and down the faded ghost of what's left of grand old Route 66, with its now-abandoned 1930's Bonnie and Clyde tourist court hotels, the infamous Crystal Pistol strip club, and past a faded neon sign with a cowboy, advertising yet another run-down motel, that I had adored in childhood. We rolled up on the outskirts of Borger at mid-afternoon, and I was shocked to see the Pantex refinery stretching out on the horizon just as menacing and black and huge as at it had been in my childhood -- although it certainly seems to have been tamed a little and doesn't belch out the sky full of carbon black it did during my childhood. This is the refinery in which my poor maternal grandfather contracted black lung disease of the eyes after thirty years of backbreaking, filthy labor there. I said to Natasha, "There it is! There's that old son-of-a-bitch!" She laughed. She can't imagine, city girl that she is, the hard, dirty life of my father and uncles and grandfathers there in the oil fields. We stopped a minute to take photographs in front of the only sight Borger has to distinguish it from any of a hundred oil field boomtowns -- the "Chrome Dome" – a geodesic dome built from Buckminster Fuller's designs in the 1950's. And then, it was on to Main Street. I was not prepared for how totally "gone down" my old hometown has become. With the prices of oil and gas falling since the 'Seventies, more than half the town's population has departed. I began to weep almost immediately as I took my own daughter on the walk that had once been a Saturday morning ritual for my Daddy and me. The once enticing stores on Main Street are mostly empty storefronts now, used, it appears, only for occasional flea market sales or strange, evangelical church services. I found the ghost of the red sign with gilded letters that once marked my favorite dime store, M.E. Moses. I found what had been the town's florist and funeral home at the time of my father's death in 1963. I found the original home of my life-long love of the movies, the Morley Theater; judging by the faded posters, it's been closed now for over a decade. The barbershop next door is also long-deserted, and I photographed its tattered, striped awning, threads flapping in the wind. Then I had Natasha walk around the corner with me to the only tall building in my little hometown, the Hotel Borger. It had once been my childhood ambition to return to Borger rich and famous one day and stay just one night there. But the Hotel Borger is now a ruin, abandoned. Signs beside its once gorgeous Bauhaus-inspired front door warn trespassers to stay away. It's been decades since the floor lamps in its lobby lighted the film-noirish magnolia-flowered carpet of its interior. We returned to the car, parked in front of what was once Western Auto, and took a quick drive by the public library, my father's and my favorite Saturday morning haunt.

Then we drove the few blocks to the house that was my home from the age of eighteen months until I was ten. This was the main place I wanted my daughter to photograph me standing in front of on our entire journey. As soon as we turned onto my old street I could see we were in trouble; what had once been a poor-but-decent street populated by steadily employed, hard-working home-owners appears to now be populated by dangerous-looking characters (who probably operate illicit speed labs), and packs of feral, barking dogs! My old house, though obviously still inhabited, is much changed -- its righteous white clapboards have been replaced by some kind of manufactured bricks forming a fake facade, the whole thing's been painted rusty brown, and a huge sign warns that "trespassers will be shot"! Worst of all, the two trees my parents and grandparents lovingly nurtured through hard winters, tornados and dirt storms have been chopped down! Natasha was terrified, but agreed to take the photograph I wanted; she set her camera meter readings while safely inside the car, however. I stood in the gutter by the driveway while she quickly took the shot just as dogs began barking and frothing at us from a chicken-wire enclosure across the street. We jumped back into the car and sped off; as we left, I realized the wooden house number sign still hanging from the porch was the very sign my father had made in my early childhood.

We made a quick pass by the other home of my childhood, the apartment complex my father managed and in which we lived at the time of his death. The complex has now been taken over by the city and is a public housing project. I pointed out to Natasha where I learned to ride a bicycle, the playground where I broke my nose, and the unit in which we lived. We drove the few blocks past my now-abandoned elementary school, and on to my grandmother's house. It had fared a little better than the house that once was my parents'; its new tenants have installed a manufactured bay window and plastic siding. But my grandmother's beloved, exotic Mimosa tree has also been chopped down! I thought of all the little unmarked graves of beloved dogs in my grandmother's back yard.

By then it was 5:00 p.m. and Natasha was hungry and cranky, so we did the unthinkable -- we stopped for barbequed ribs for the second day in a row! The second most legendary barbeque in the whole state is cooked at a small place called Sutphen's, established in the 'Fifties by a couple who attended our church. Once again, we dined on phenomenal, fragrant, finger-sucking ribs, cole slaw and potato salad, and huge glasses of sweet tea. This delicious meal, perhaps, partially made up for the afternoon's travails to Natasha.

We got back on the road about an hour later to drive the twenty-seven miles to my father's hometown, Pampa, where we were to spend the night. On the way into town we stopped at the cemetery and visited the graves of my father and all my grandparents. Nobody's left, any more, in the Panhandle, to tend their graves. It saddened me, on Memorial Day, to see all the flags and flowers placed on the other graves by the descendents of their occupants. All I could do was clean the markers of my loved ones a little using spit and my fingertips. And then I lay down on each one of them and had a little conversation and cried a little. (During this interval, Natasha took a walk, reading the names and dates carved on nearby tombstones.) And then I did something I've been meaning to do for years: I took an empty McDonald's Coke cup from the car, and scratched out a handful of dirt from my father's grave. You see, there is no reason for me ever, ever to return to the Panhandle, now that I've made this pilgrimage with my younger child. But, like Dracula, I always wanted a handful of my native soil to take with me everywhere I go. So now I have it.

Then we drove down the road a little to one of the town's two motels; of course, the one in which we stayed was the one which had been the grandest in my childhood. The desk clerk told us we were just in time, that the old place is being closed next week for modernization and renovation. And so, I signed the register and paid for the room in cash as a dusty oil painting of a Spanish conquistador looked on; it is, after all the Grand Coronado Inn. A sign near the hotel's door informed us that movie stars, Presidents and all kinds of oil barons had stayed there. Natasha unlocked the door to our room and was not terribly impressed with its run-down decor and threadbare furnishings. "Kitsch" is not a word that approaches proper description of the place; as she observed, "This looks like a place a drunken rodeo cowboy would bring a whore." Damn straight. We turned the air conditioner on high, brought our luggage in, and triple-locked the door for the night.

Day 3: Pampa, Texas to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

We rose early, grabbed a cup of drive-through coffee, and headed down the Woodie Guthrie Memorial Highway for Amarillo, Texas, where we would once again connect to what used to be Route 66. When we arrived in Amarillo, I decided to drive Natasha past the IHOP parking lot where the much-publicized killing of a Goth boy took place several years ago; he was cold-bloodedly run down by a Cadillac driven by a "normal" who was his classmate. Natasha took a photograph. We had a quick breakfast at a nearby cafe with a jukebox; I fed it a dollar and played some George Jones, including "He Stopped Loving Her Today."

We struck out to Cadillac Ranch (an art project of eccentric millionaire Stanley Marsh 3 -- a row of vintage Cadillacs buried nose-down in a vacant field with their tail fins jutting up), where we planned to take photographs. Cadillac Ranch is significant to me because twenty years ago this Labor Day, Natasha's father and I were married in front of the turquoise automobile. As we approached, we noticed there were a lot of cars parked at the roadside, and film production vans and booms visible in the distance. "Shit!" I opined. "The one day in all history when we planned to visit something *would* be going on!" We decided to brave the activity so that I could get a photo of Natasha in front of the site of her parents' marriage ceremony. When we got up to the cars we learned two documentaries were being shot, due to the fact that a hotel chain has subsidized repainting the buried Caddies. A woman stuck a microphone in my face and asked why we had come out to view the renovation and I explained my wedding story. Immediately the documentary makers and photographers were all over us, and Natasha and I patiently and graciously responded to their questions and signed releases in front of that turquoise automobile. Supposedly there was video somewhere on the web of the events that day.

This occurrence is only odd -- and synergistic -- due to the fact that on my wedding day, nearly twenty years ago, I emerged from the rented limousine to see another film crew and booms on the flat horizon as I made my bridal march down the dirt path. Unbeknownst to us, Stanley Marsh had notified a German television program about our wedding, and their footage was shown on German television, on a program equivalent to America's "That's Incredible!" It was a little strange and sad to have to keep repeating the statement that although Cadillac Ranch has endured and that my now grown-up daughter is the issue of the union formalized there, the marriage ended after seventeen years.

We took our photos, made our exit, and sped down the road toward the New Mexico state line. We were astounded to see a Stuckey's tourist trap still existed there, and at Natasha's insistence, we pulled over for a minute. Natasha was just as thrilled as I once was as a child at the sight of all those cheap, lurid tourist goods -- she joyfully prowled through the pecan logs, the plastic Indian dolls with papooses on their backs, the fake Indian moccasins and headdresses, the scorpions and rattle snake rattles encased in plastic. I purchased a New Mexico map to guide us through the rest of our journey, and she purchased a Route 66 coin purse and matching lighter, and we got back on the road.

We turned north at Clines Corners and began our ascent to northern New Mexico. My daughter had never seen this gorgeous landscape, and she was entranced as the blue forms on the distant horizon grew closer and closer and revealed themselves to be sure-enough mountains. The day was beautiful -- bright and clear. We made good time. I knew we were nearly in Santa Fe when we saw the first adobe houses about thirty minutes outside town.

By early afternoon I was guided by my (sound!) memory of the route from the highway to Santa Fe's ancient plaza, and we were soon checking in at Hotel St. Francis. This hotel, which was known as the De Vargas when I lived in Santa Fe twenty-odd years ago, was once the town's seedy and colorful hotel -- roughly equivalent, say, to the Chelsea -- where bohemian artists resided permanently and rock stars and Eurotrash stayed, and where I myself had honeymooned. When I lived in Santa Fe from 1973-80, people mainly visited the De Vargas to buy drugs. The hotel's now been restored to its previous World War I glory by new owners and has a decidedly European air to it; our lovely and comfortable third-floor room reminded me very much of a room in which I'd spent my time in Venice. The white lace curtained windows swung out on a glorious view of adobe rooftops and cooing pigeons. We freshened up a bit and went downstairs to the small, dark bar, where I ordered a Campari and soda for me and a Coke for Natasha, and then we sat for a few minutes on the hotel's veranda, basking in the bright sunshine, happy not to be driving, making plans for the afternoon.

Then we struck out on a tour of all the places I lived and worked in Santa Fe those many years ago. Santa Fe's a strange place in that the buildings themselves, many four hundred year-old adobes, never change -- just the human tenants and businesses are mutable. We found what had been the Plaza Woolworth's (where my first husband once worked in the soda fountain) now closed-up and vacant. The grocery store I once frequented is now a designer leather boutique! Only the high-end shops that specialize in Indian rugs and pottery and jewelry at exorbitant prices to tourists are still in their original locations and largely unchanged.

Santa Fe now has a Gap and a J.Crew store! I was shocked. When I lived in Santa Fe, it was a sleepy little village populated by a hundred tribes of Native Americans, the Spanish (not Mexican!) descendants of the region's conquistadores, and a motley crew of run-away bohemian Anglos -- beatniks, painters, writers, hippies -- who worked "real jobs" as infrequently as possible. Now I see, sadly, my favorite little town in the whole world is horribly gentrified. It's as if every thirty-year-old dot.com/high tech early-retired millionaire in the whole country's moved there and bought a three hundred year-old adobe casa in the mountains. Hardly anything now seems *real*! Who is buying all that design-y Italian furniture?! Who is shopping at Ann Taylor?! And how in heck did there get to be not one, but two, boutiques selling Japanese goods within walking distance of the Plaza?!

And so I had myself a sad little case of "you can't go home again" as we strolled the afternoon away and I pointed out to my daughter my charming old apartments, where my favorite bakery had stood, what had been the public library, and all the bars I'd once worked in. Santa Fe is still a beautiful place, architecturally and climate-wise, but it is forever changed now, and for the worse.

We returned to the St. Francis to get ready to meet my one old, old friend who still lives in Santa Fe. We sat on the veranda at sunset waiting for her and when she approached, I realized I would have known her anywhere, although I haven't seen her in twenty years and we only recently regained contact with each other -- thanks, e-mail! We ran into each others' arms like something from an old Clairol commercial, kissing and weeping. Bae is as little changed by the years as I hope I am -- I always called her Cleopatra in my mind. Like me, she still retains her waist-length hair, but the jet-black is now streaked with silver. (I just dye mine red to hide the ravages of time!) Her extraordinary amber eyes are still kohl-ringed, her fine, soft, tanned skin is still unlined, and she wore a fabulous vintage housedress and beaded Turkish slippers. Her wonderful "energy," also, is unchanged; she's still the funny, observant, calm, grounded Earth Mother she always was.

Bae drove us into the ski basin to the Japanese bathhouse we used to frequent twenty years ago -- usually at about midnight, when a group of us was roaring drunk on tannic red wine. It's a spa now and closes at 9:00 p.m., but, other than that, is largely unchanged. Poor Natasha gamely stripped with Bae and me, showered, and donned a raw cotton kimono, and then we tip-toed up a flight of steps to our own fenced, private tub -- roofless, so we could see the mountain stars as they came out twinkling. For the next hour, Bae and I fast-forwarded through twenty years of living, working and going to school, ex-husbands, and the childhoods of our four collective children. Natasha just enjoyed the tub and went out from time to time to take the heart-stopping cold plunge before returning to the heated water of the bath. Bae was good, I must say, and refrained from telling my daughter too many scandalous stories of her mother's wild, beautiful and misspent youth. I had to kick her underwater when she said, "Yeah, your mother was a wild woman and would get naked and roll around with anyone at the drop of a hat -- she didn't ever wear underwear!" To which Natasha drolly responded, "She *still* hardly ever wears underwear."

And then our blessed hour in the tub was up, and, worn out and sleepy, we dressed and drove back into town. Bae took us to the one noodle house that stays open late for steaming bowls of fragrant noodles. Then, exhausted from our long drive and time-traveling, Bae dropped Natasha and me back at our hotel, we crawled between clean white sheets, and went to sleep as soon as our heads hit the pillows.

Day Four: Santa Fe, New Mexico

Oh, how I love to stay in hotels. I could spend my life in them, especially the old, genteel ones. I'd ordered room service the night before, and, right on cue at 7:30, a gentle knock at the door awakened me and a beautiful boy brought in a silver tray with white linens upon which a pot of coffee for me and a pot of tea for Natasha rested. Natasha struggled to an upright position, rubbing her eyes and pulling the bed sheets up around her as I signed the ticket. "Now," says I, "*This* is glamour."

We had our coffee and tea, showered, dressed, applied sunscreen, and struck out upon our second day's stroll. We went first to the post office, blessedly exactly where it *should* be and unchanged, to mail dozens of post cards to our friends all over the world. Then we visited St. Francis Cathedral, the 19th century French Romanesque church built by the French Bishop Lamy, title character of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. I couldn't wait to show Natasha where I used to come in the early dark mornings to stand at the back of the church and hear Mass said before I went to work. (These were back in the days of my idealistic youth, when I still harbored some kind of religious beliefs and found comfort in the rituals, and the incense!, of the Church.) I took her to a side chapel to show her the scariest darned crucifix in the entire world with its life-sized figure of Christ, carved of wood, painted gruesomely realistically, complete with wounds, a human hair wig, and tortured, glassy eyes turned Heavenward. (He's missing several fingers, due to the fact that parishioners a couple of hundred years ago used to lop them off and burn them during times of cholera to ward off Evil.) I also pointed out to her the beautiful wooden statue of the Virgin high up in a niche over an equally beautiful and disturbing statue of Jesus, complete with crown of thorns and bound hands. I regaled Natasha with tales of the Virgin's wardrobe; the faithful parishioners *still* sew clothes for her, and her gown changes for every important religious holiday. It was sad our visit didn't coincide with Corpus Christi, the nearest date upon which she'd be carried through the streets of Santa Fe on a pallet decorated with flowers, accompanied by altar boys bearing candles and banners, and flanked by the Native American parishioners beating their drums. I related the legend that this statue of the Virgin has gold undergarments, and that her lovely, flowing brown curly hair was donated by the most beautiful and pious of the Spanish girls who inhabited Santa Fe two hundred years ago. I told Natasha this Virgin is called Virgen Conquistadora by the locals, and how the priests don't like this. They say, "Finish it! You can call her that as long as you say Virgen Conquistadora de los Carazons y los Almas." (Of the hearts and souls.) Natasha and I dropped coins into the poor box and lit candles there in the chapel. I don't know what Natasha's prayer was for, but mine was one of thanks, to have lived so long to have returned to this chapel with my daughter.

Next, we went next door to Loretto Chapel, with its "miraculous" wooden staircase. It's another French Franciscan church and modeled after Ste. Chapelle in Paris -- very French and white, like a wedding cake, compared to St. Francis Cathedral, which is darker and more like Notre Dame. I think Loretto's used these days only when novices are taking their vows. Natasha really liked the gilded plaster 19th century Stations of the Cross statues in niches down the length of the chapel. Legend has it that neither the architect nor the nuns realized until the chapel was nearing completion that there was no way to build a staircase to the choir loft inside the stone church, and that a lowly ladder would have to be used instead. Then, a young itinerant carpenter showed up, and constructed a spiral staircase that fit perfectly; it contained not a single nail. Its pieces were so ingeniously engineered that it held itself together solely with pegs and gravity. The day arrived when the nuns were to pay the agreed-upon fee to the mysterious itinerant carpenter, yet he never appeared to collect his payment. Opinions differ as to whether the Carpenter was Jesus himself, or his earthly father, St. Joseph.

Having done our spiritual duties, we hiked up Canyon Road. When I lived in Santa Fe, it was home mainly to not-too-serious "artists," mainly former WWII GI's who'd settled there in the 'Fifties as beatniks and liked to fart around with art supplies and hire attractive female life models to pose for them. You know -- like Gene Kelly in _American in Paris_ -- and all of these old satyrs thought they were Picasso. None of them really expected to live off their art, and to say they ran "art galleries" would really be too strong of a term for their sloppy, ad-hoc displays. If some gullible tourist gave them $50 for a sloppy oil painting of picturesque Indians they called it a good week. Times have changed. Canyon Road is now "real" galleries from one end to the other -- multi-thousand dollar (bad!) bronze statues by people who went to Art School now dot the narrow, nearly impassable street. Four-star restaurants replace what used to be little better than saloons where one could while away the afternoon drinking sangria or tequila shots. After a few blocks, Natasha queried, "Remind me why we are here?" and I had to agree and laugh. We turned left on the next connecting street we passed, and headed back to the Plaza. On our way we passed the magnificent four-hundred-year-old adobe house whose basement I once inhabited when I was just the age my daughter is now -- unchanged and beautiful as ever.

Now, I must admit here a terrible, shocking aspect of my character. I love to shop -- browse, window shop. I'm not as bad as, say, Patsy, on "Absolutely Fabulous" -- with whom I am sometimes unflatteringly compared -- but I'll say this: I've been all over the world and my favorite way to soak in the culture of a country is not, as one might expect, in art galleries and museums, but, instead, by shopping the local scene. And I'm a very snotty shopper in my own way. No designer labels or status logos for me, thank you! Just take me to the funkiest, low-down places the locals shop, the hard-core, scary flea markets and bazaars, and I'm ecstatic. My daughter has inherited this genetic trait from me, so we agreed that the best use of the rest of our day would be to go first to the bank to cash in some traveler's checks, and then proceed to SHOP. Which we did.

We went first to a place I used to adore. It's a gift shop called Doodlet's, and it's in the same space it's been in since the 'Forties. In my day, it was run by a crotchety, huge, ancient, long-white-braids, dirndl-wearing Bavarian matriarch, Frau Ruthling. Now her elderly daughter runs the place. Natasha and I shopped in ecstasy for the small, kitschy items so near and dear to our hearts. For $20 US I left with a pin of the Sacred Heart, a tin crucifix, a small print of Anima Sola (my personal symbol -- a long-haired, manacled woman, burning in Purgatory), an Anima Sola floaty pen, and a sparkly modular plastic 'Sixties heart ring. Natasha fared equally well: among other things, she picked up a rubber heart with nails driven through it. Natasha was eager to shop for jewelry, beads and Mexican tin, so we got into the car and I drove her out to the most hard-core Mexican kitsch place in Santa Fe, Jackalope. (A jackalope is the mythical animal resulting from the union one full-moon-night of a jack rabbit and an antelope -- it's said to sing with the haunting human voice of a siren when the moon is full.) This turned out to be a brilliant idea. Natasha spent about $30 US and left with, among other things, two strings of turquoise heishi, a string of fresh-water pearls, and a Dia de Los Muertos mobile. I fared equally well, acquiring for $40 US a large Mexican tin triptych mirror, and a Tolaveras ceramic cross.

Having had such great luck shopping, we turned our sights toward making our one true cultural foray while in Santa Fe, the incredible Folk Art Museum. We spent a couple of hours drooling over the museum's phenomenal collections of every toy ever known to mankind made everywhere in the world. The museum was nearly empty, so we had it to ourselves and could make all the wisecracks and giggle all we wanted to without being overheard. My most favorite things: the 19th Century French paper theaters, once sold inexpensively like a set of paper dolls, for children to assemble and play with at home. My very favorite had the name "Ambigu" and pictured women in a Turkish harem. My second favorite thing was a strange installation of dolls in a doll house; a series of Mexican tourist dolls waited upon a small plastic Anglo baby doll, (obviously) sick in a big iron doll bed, with a small toy doll of its own beside it to comfort it. A miniature religious print of an angel hung over the bed. One of the Mexican dolls stood beside a basin in which a piece of toast soaked in water. It was a scene equaled only by Edward Gorey in its piquancy, and I cannot *wait* to start on a drawing of this subject. Natasha was much struck by the terrifying wax dolls, and by a strong Mexican mermaid wrestling a shark -- she was installed in a scene with other ceramic mermaids greeting sailors as they sailed by in antique toy boats. If any of you finds yourself in Santa Fe, this is my "cultural" recommendation: skip the absurd, chi-chi galleries of Canyon Road and the musty, rusty Palace of the Governors. Head straight to the Folk Art Museum, and the Wheelwright Native American Museum, both in the same complex out Old Santa Fe Trail. You will not be disappointed in the museums' holdings, and they sit amid beautiful mountains which still house a Franciscan monastery. If you are very, very lucky and can arrive at Vespers, you'll hear the songs of the monks drifting down.

So, after a hard day of shopping, we returned to our hotel to shower and get ready to meet Bae for dinner. Bae and I had a hard time deciding where to dine, since both of us had been poor hippie girls "back in the day" and certainly not able to sample Santa Fe's four- and five-star restaurants then. Eventually we settled on a place that's been run by the same family for sixty years -- upscale, but not annoying. Bae arrived at 7:00 p.m., and the three of us walked the few blocks from the hotel to Sena Plaza, where we enjoyed margaritas (straight up, shaken over ice and strained, as is the Santa Fe tradition) and a wonderful meal of blue corn enchiladas and green chile and posole. On our way out I pointed out the second floor office in Sena Plaza where the law firm I worked for was then housed, and regaled Natasha with tales of La Llorana, the weeping woman who searches the huge old rambling casa for her lost baby. (I used to hate to be the last one left at work in the evenings, because I often thought I heard her cries and glimpsed her shrouded form in the shadows of the courtyard.)

Then, a little tipsy and giggling, we headed to the grand old La Fonda Hotel, where I was day bartender for a time, waiting on customers such as Walter Matthau, the brothers Coppola, Joni Mitchell, Rock Hudson, etc., etc. The La Fonda is a grand old war-horse, and has a gothic sense of timelessness about it -- like the hotel in The Shining. Nothing ever changes here. A hundred winters with fires burning in the fireplaces have totally smoked-up the hotel's interior, but all the original 1920's murals and frescoes of Flamenco dancers, bullfighters, Kachinas, etc., are still intact. I was happy to see that none of the original folk-art painted flower decorations on the hotel's interior hallways has been obliterated. We took the ancient elevator up to the fifth floor and emerged at La Fonda's rooftop bar, just in time to reminisce a little more and drink snifters of Napoleon brandy as the fiery sun sank below the horizon and the evening turned cool. It's beautiful up there, with the whole adobe village of original Santa Fe and its twinkling lights spread out below you.

Eventually we returned to our hotel so that Bae could get up in time to go to work the next morning -- she's a conservator of photography with one of the local museums. Natasha was exhausted and fell into bed. I felt restless and locked my daughter in the room and went on a solitary moonlit prowl to the Plaza, by then quiet and deserted. A million memories flooded over me as I walked. It's funny, how memory resides so completely in my nose. Santa Fe, to me, is the smell of cedar and sage, of smoke coming from ancient adobe fireplaces. It's where, probably, I spent the most vibrant and happiest days of my youth.

Eventually I decided I could sleep, but I stopped first at the hotel's dark and intimate bar for the day's final cup of coffee. Outside, on the veranda, I overhear the conversations of a new generation of kids from all over the U.S. who've arrived at Mecca Santa Fe just in the past few months. The girls, who are about Natasha's age, wear sari skirts and midriff tops, showing off tattoos; they have dred locks or tiny rows of corn-row braids. The snatches of conversation I catch betray that they, like Bae and me thirty years ago, have come to Santa Fe to escape perceived or real restrictive life-styles in far-removed locations. Poor little sweeties. They'll slave at tourism-related service jobs a few months, share a tiny, over-priced apartment with five others, and, hopefully, come to their senses and return to college. Bae and I weren't such quick studies; it took us many more years to build up a resistance to Santa Fe's seductive and fatal charms. But, I suppose, the two of us have turned out okay, considering our detours.

Day Five: Santa Fe to San Angelo, Texas.

The gentle knock of yet another beautiful boy awakes us and we start our day, once again, with room service coffee and tea. We shower and dress and start to get our stuff together, since we'll be checking out soon. Since this day promises to be a little unpredictable, we head off for breakfast at the French bakery located in La Fonda's ground floor. This was the place I stopped by in the morning for coffee between Mass and going to work in the law firm for years. All my French friends spent stints working there, and it was a virtual home base for me. Nothing has changed, except, possibly, the Provencal fabric that makes up the window curtains. The fireplace is still there, as are the enigmatic, empty nichos for invisible or kidnapped santos. We ate warm croissants and drank more coffee among the locals who still seem to congregate there to read morning papers before starting their days. Our waitress told me I looked like "the married woman in The Tao of Steve, only prettier. You know, short bangs, long hair." This reference was completely lost on me. I like to think I look a little like the lovechild of Bettie Page and Loretta Lynn.

We'd arranged to join Bae at her work to meet her boyfriend and hook up to go to the Tesuque flea market before we left town. We checked out of the hotel and drove up to the institute where Bae works in the ski basin -- marvelous modernist mansion, donated by some rich benefactor to the non-profit organization. Natasha took the view camera and busied herself making scenic shots of the mountains while Bae introduced me to some of her co-workers. We then tracked down her new love, a co-worker with whom she's just moved in -- at his country house. She had warned me that Marcus was handsome, but, man! I didn't know physicists ever came in that kind of packaging! (Like me, the marriage that produced Bae's two daughters ended two years ago, but bitterly, in Bae's case. Her Cleveland architect ex-husband retains primary custody of the children, based upon his superior earning power. So it's good, at menopause, that Bae has this sweet new love to console her at least a little bit.) Marcus has long, soft sandy locks pulled back into a pony-tail, green eyes, and the legs of a runner --he's wearing shorts. He's polite, attentive and grave, but has a twinkle to his eyes. He's twelve years younger than Bae. Good on her! I am so happy for them. She confided last night that she tells him all the time he looks as if he is covered in honey -- and it's obvious he's crazy for her.

So Bae and I retrieve Natasha from her photographing and get in the rental car and head out past the glorious Santa Fe Opera amphitheater to the Tesuque Flea Market, which Bae promises is exactly my kind of shopping. She's right! Immediately I score the silver Zuni cuff bracelet I coveted (priced at $100 on the Plaza) for $28, a simple, silver bezel-set turquoise ring for $10, and tiny turquoise and silver studs for $2. Bae wants to show me the place where she and Marcus recently purchased rugs for his country home, so we trudge down gravel aisles between the vendors' tents. She takes me to Omar's booth, festooned with carpets and tapestries from Turkey, India and the Middle East. I'm in heaven. My Gypsy nomad enzymes are all a-titter. I could stay there forever! But, alas! A magic carpet is not on my current shopping list, so I soon set off by myself to swoon over antique wooden blocks for batik printing, African sandals, colorful ceramic basins from Mexico, and a world of other treasures. When I next catch sight of Natasha, she's purchasing an incredible fuchsia sarong with block-printed cranes on it. We drink lemonade sold by a vendor with big glass jars full of colorful liquids -- it's a blindingly white sunny day in the high altitudes. Bae has only about an hour to spare, so we regretfully soon cut short our shopping expedition to deliver her back to her work. Many hugs and kisses are exchanged before Natasha and I consult the map and head out of Santa Fe. It has been so good to see Bae after these twenty years; both of us remark how it seems only days have passed. She promises to visit us in Austin soon, and we promise to return to Santa Fe during the snowy winter season.

By a little after noon we are back on the road. Good-bye, mountains! Good-bye, adobe architecture! I tell Natasha to turn around and take one last fond look back for me. I can't stand to do it myself.

And then, the heart-breaking, back-breaking long journey back to Austin begins. Natasha confides immediately that she is beginning to get homesick for her own bed, and she wants me to hurry, to drive straight through the night so that we get all the way home in one day. She calculates different possible routes. I'm thinking to myself that it's impossible, no matter how she figures it. I'm thinking to myself, I'm too old, too tired, and my night vision is too poor to chance this. I'm thinking, I'll need to smoke and pee, she'll go to sleep on me once the sun goes down. But, aloud I say, "Well, I'll *try*." The trip back home's a blur, as return journeys always are, with their sad, anti-climactic quality. There's no anticipation left. There's just drudgery, and hundreds of tedious slow miles to drive, once the vacation's over.

We took the Roswell route, which provided at least a few moments’ comic relief, with all its alien-motif billboards, restaurants and other advertising. At nightfall I tanked up on gas and downed a cup of coffee at Big Spring, Texas, psyching myself up to drive all night without stopping again. As I predicted, Natasha began to fight her impulse to drop off to sleep once it was truly dark. We'd listened to every single CD we brought along on our journey, and the car's radio brought in only static. So, once again, I put on my favorite Nine Inch Nails. Then the night turned black and eerie -- like driving on a lost highway -- no other cars, just the safety stripes on the road illuminated by the car's headlights. Natasha dozed. The car rolled along. We passed an enigmatic sign which read, "Cannibal Draw."

I love road trips for all the road signs you see along the way -- all the names of streets you'll never traverse, all the names of towns you'll never visit. Since I didn't have Natasha to talk to any longer to stay awake, I decided to try thinking. These are the things I thought about:

1. Bae. Bae must be the reason I know about Chock Full of Nuts coffee. How the hell else would a girl from Texas know about Chock Full of Nuts? It's a New York Thing. Thank God for Bae. Without her, I'd never know about a lot of things -- what a bris is, for instance.
2. Natasha. I love how at home she is in her own body. She was definitely the wet dream of the Northern New Mexico low-riding vatos, with her Sophia Loren body and curly long flowing hair and bright green eyes. Coyote ("co-yo-TAY"), they yelled. That's what they used to call me, too, at her age. Coyote. A term that implies a maybe-stuck-up, hot, part-Anglo Latin chick. Of course, they don't literally *call you* that. Coyote is something boys scream out the window of customized cars, accompanied by whoops of aie-yi-yi!!! I'm so glad I had the chance to take this road trip with her, just the two of us. Things I've recently learned about my daughter: she prefers to consume three square meals a day, at a regimented time, over snacking spur-of- the-moment when hunger strikes. She prefers to sleep in her own bed, rather than a strange one, unlike her old mother. She's fonder of things that are familiar than things that are unfamiliar --also unlike her old mother. She misses her friends.
3. I definitely need to get a boyfriend. Last night I had a weird dream about detached-from-man, cartoon-character penises, not bloody or implying previous Lorena Bobbitt violence, with little smiley mouths on their heads and no eyes or noses, like friendly skinny water balloons or large jelly beans. They were in a glass jar, and you could buy them. They were so cute, with their smiling mouths! Doctor Freud! Calling Doctor Freud! Could this just mean I miss my vibrator, discretely left back home in Austin?
4. I *have* driven this god-forsaken route before. Twenty some-odd years ago I drove the female love-of-my-life back down this road to Texas, to the truck stop cafe where her mother worked in her old hometown. My then lady-love had moved from Texas to Santa Fe to live with me. We were going to be openly "a couple." But she couldn't stand to break her mother's heart over her sexuality. And so I delivered her back to Texas. And then I drove most of the way back to Santa Fe in tears.

I continued to think, and I continued to drive mindlessly. At about midnight, I summonsed Natasha from her napping and told her we had to stop for the night. We were then approaching San Angelo. We passed a Denny's, where we stopped and had breakfast at midnight, and then I drug my tired old ass back into the car and down the road to a nearby Motel Six. We lugged our stuff in, I left a wake-up call for 7a.m., and both of us crashed instantly.

Day Six: San Angelo to Austin, Texas.

Homecoming day! I get to see my doggies again! I get to get out of the car! My ass gets to wake up again, and my poor knees can uncramp once I unfold my long legs for good!

We got on the road at 7:00 a.m. and struck out on a beautiful, quiet clear morning. I set the cruise control at three miles above the 75 mile- per-hour speed limit, and we made great time. About an hour outside of Austin we began to notice droves of Harley drivers on the roads – a rally, evidently. And then -- thank you, Jesus! -- the sign that announced we had finally arrived inside Austin's city limits. I confided to Natasha that the only time I pray is when embarking on air plane flights or starting out on road trips, and that I was indeed sincerely thanking sweet little baby Jesus, not big, bloody, guilt-inducing Jesus, for bringing the two of us back home safely.

By noon we were all the way, all the way, all they way home. By 5:00 p.m., I'd picked up the dogs, returned the rental car, been to the grocery store, dropped off and picked up the photographs and washed the dirty road trip clothes.

We covered a lot of ground in six days, and I had a plethora of thoughts and sensations, as you see from my accounts. I guess I'm glad to be home. I don't know, though. I really love the freedom of traveling, the invisibility of being "unknown" and the comfort that allows. I like traveling, as an introvert. I have no identity. No one knows me, no one tries to speak to me. It's a way to perfect the "aesthetic of 'lone,'" I suppose.

Paris (1995)

2009-06-25T11:09:00.002-05:00

Arrived in Paris from Rome through the marvelous Gâre de Lyon, got a taxi ride to my hotel from a gorgeous, Belmondo-looking cab driver. Paris seems very pale and severe compared to Italy. The average Parisian doesn't have the high-style quotient of the average Italian, but they are much friendlier and less formal. After I settled in and took a long bath, listening to French t.v., I went up to Montmartre and had a café au lait served to me by a funny fellow who sang to me. On the steps of Sacre Coeur an accordionist played. Back down the butte to Notre Dame, where a mass was going on and incense bellowed smoke as I said a prayer of thanks for safe travels and lighted a candle. Then I went in search of a brasserie for pommes frites and onion soup and a glass of red wine. The waiters there smoked on the floor and old ladies brought their dogs inside to sit at their tables. One elderly woman struck up a conversation with me, which I enjoyed. She launched into a long tirade and I mainly nodded and smiled. I don't think she knew me as American.

+ + + + + + +

Last night I went out on a bateau-mouche. It was cold and rainy and I stood outside the cover, behind the navigator, ignoring the recorded commentary in seven languages so I could see the lighted monuments and landmarks at night. The Eiffel Tower, which does nothing special to me in the daylight, becomes magical at night -- a piece of gold filigree jewelry.

+ + + + + + +

The Louvre is just a series of mazes, four stories high and several blocks square. I had researched the location of several works in advance so I could do it in a single day, before I became nauseated and visually overloaded. So, first, at a trot, to Victory of Samothrace -- really, the boat she stands in is the most interesting part to me, and the streams of exhausted tourists sitting down to rest their feet on the Audrey Hepburn staircase. Then to Da Vinci's paintings, past the Mona Lisa, in search of the Spanish paintings -- only to find that wing, which I had looked forward to so much, closed down for renovation. Then to Venus de Milo through the Roman head-on-a-stake wing (very interesting!), then to the salon of the Caryatids: Three Graces, startling hermaphrodite, baby strangling goose, bathers, and so forth. Somewhere along the way I encountered real stunners by Delacroix, Ingres, David, LaTour, Vigée-Le Brun, Corot, and, finally, to the Northern wing and the heart-stopping Pietá d'Avignon. Breezed past some not half bad French "Caravaggists" and to one Caravaggio, the Palmreader. The Fragonards I still loathe in person. Watteau is better than I thought.

I don't know why anyone who hasn't studied art or art history would want to go to the Louvre. It's so confusing, like a huge airport with escalators. I like the glass pyramid entrance and the tension it creates against the palace buildings, though.

I notice all the fingers and noses are busted off the statues all over Europe. Very few of the insipid statues in the Tuilleries still have their hands intact, and many are mostly melted by acid rain and appear to be sculpted from sooty toothpaste or wedding cake frosting.

+ + + + + + +

Got up early and headed out to be at the Rodin museum just as it opened. Light rain falling. Working-class guy in a cap came out of a café and kissed his fingertips in approval as I passed, bowed, and then I came upon the museum. Very beautiful building, grounds with gardens, The Thinker surrounded by roses, bronze statues hiding under trees. The Rodin sculptures are more powerful in person when you can follow the directional movements of his chisel.

The presence of Camille Claudel is very strong in the Rodin museum. You see her face over and over again made by Rodin, and his face made by her. What an unbelievable passion between men and women portrayed in both their works. She really was very gifted and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish whose works are whose. Rodin's drawings are, to my eye, every bit as powerful as the sculptures. I loved the contour gesture drawings. Hard to say if Balzac was a real bastard, or not; loved the bullish, big-bellied nude study Rodin made of him. I also enjoyed seeing portraits of Rodin by his contemporaries; I had a very definite sense of him after a couple of hours. Gerard Depardieu is a very good choice to play him. I think Camille Claudel was right not to resist him, to surrender and be swept away into the drama. But it is tragic that she and Rodin's wife had to suffer so much to be in a relationship with him. The Danaïde was definitely my favorite. I was the only one in the room, so the nice guard invited me to touch her. And I did!

Then, on to Musée D'Orsay, bypassing long lines with my previously purchased museum pass. The space itself is great and its previous incarnation as a train station is still discernible architecturally. The collection is the right size, the galleries are constructed on a human scale, and it's laid out chronologically. I much prefer it to the Louvre. So many stand-outs: Tissot, Manet -- but, of course, the pastels and paintings and drawings of Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec are what's most important to me.

On the way back to my hotel, as I walked on the quay of the Seine, I was splashed by a bus -- salud! -- and then I cut my finger on my umbrella. For just a moment then I felt sad and lonely and cold and miserable. But I soon got over it.

+ + + + + + +

Started out early, stopped to buy orange roses, headed off to Cimitière Montmartre. It's a lovely place and wonderful to wander there in the tree-shaded early morning. I found Degas' grave as if guided by radar. Sat down and wrote a note to him and sent it sailing in through a rear opening of his tomb and left the roses at his door.

At some point today a million wondrous things passed before my eyes. Store fronts, mainly, and shop windows, but also an organ grinder with a dachshund and ginger-colored cat asleep in a doll's bed together, their heads on a pillow, tucked in under the covers. I guess the organ grinder gets extra tips for the spectacle! He played "Mack the Knife" when I passed.

No one can tell me where to find an authentic boite where they still play traditional accordion music. They say it's all died out. Still, I sometimes pass old people busking down in the metro playing accordion. Today I saw a very frail, elderly woman playing "Sur les toits de Paris" on her red accordion -- very beautiful. The music follows you down the corridors and tunnels of the metro.

+ + + + + + +

Awoke at 7:00, breakfast in bed (warm croissant! white coffee!) and then off to buy flowers for my heroes and heroines buried at Pére LaChaise. Again, good luck in finding those I sought. To Colette first, black, simple marble stone, lots of fresh flowers there already. Then, accidentally, past Simone Signoret with loads and loads of fresh flowers. Past Rossini and a group of Africans in white robes singing at a relative's grave. To Sarah Bernhardt, very simple, with only a few old flowers. Then to Oscar Wilde to leave pink carnations for Michael -- Wilde's testicles have been broken off! Then to Edith Piaf. Then to Jim Morrison, under police guard and his bust has been removed and the soil of the grave dug into by the fingers of tourists. The whole area of Pére LaChaise near Morrison's grave has been vandalized -- chalked-on, spray-painted, scratched into, champagne and liquor bottles abounding at early light. Finally, to Rachel, my namesake, the famous tragic actress. By then I had left all my flowers and it was time for me to go. I feel so bad in these cemeteries for the Not Famous, for the forgotten dead who have had no fresh flowers and no visitors for a hundred years. Pére LaChaise is not as beautiful and atmospheric as Montmartre. I would prefer to be buried at Cimitiére Montmartre if I were a famous dead Parisian.

Always when you're in Parisian cemeteries you stumble across someone being disinterred. Kind of disturbing, yet I feel my curiosity rising as I try not to look.

+ + + + + + +

Well, Cinderella has just returned from La Coupole, that former stronghold of old Bohème in Montparnasse! Upstairs, there's the bustling, beautiful restaurant with waiters in traditional long white aprons. Downstairs there's the ballroom where everyone over the age of fifty in Paris assembles to dance at weekly afternoon tea dances. I waited in the rain for the opening, then descended a rounded wood staircase where older women changed into the dancing shoes they'd brought with them in shopping bags, then in line to pay my admission and to check my coat and bag. Entrance is 60 francs (US $13) and for that you get a huge cocktail in a hurricane glass once inside. I ordered something made with champagne and it arrived with a fruit and paper umbrella garnish. Then the dancing began on the round dance floor surrounded by columns and this little red-haired girl was assailed by every man in the place, because I was absolutely the baby there. I tried to explain to the gaggle, like Scarlett O'Hara at the barbeque, that I don't know how to ballroom dance, that I was just there to watch. They accepted this reluctantly, accompanied by much hand kissing. I got to watch real Parisians dance tangos and boleros and waltzes -- beautifully! After each song ended, I was assailed again. I loved just watching and getting a sense of what Paris must have been like fifty years ago when these dancers were young. The men here really can dance, but the women really have to follow their lead.

There was one white-haired guy with a crew cut and a face like Patton's dog dancing with his wife, and they were really great dancers. His Italian friend (oiled hair, smelling of some great cologne) would just not give up, and persisted in asking me for every dance as each song presented a change in tempo. Finally, on a slow song, I accepted because I figured I could follow him. He was a very smooth dancer, but, sure enough, I could tell he was getting aroused and he kept putting his cheek to mine and whispering to me how sweet I am. And I kept insisting I wasn't. So after that one dance I said I had to go to the restroom, but I secretly collected my things from the coat check girl and disappeared into the Vavin metro station, an art nouveau one, before my dance partner realized I was gone. The older women at La Coupole were not amused by my presence, siphoning off their dance partners. It looked like there were also a certain number of gigolos hanging out there, hoping to find a wealthy benefactress. You can always tell gigolos by their pastel-colored cashmere socks. Don't ask me why I noticed that.

Before I went to La Coupole I had attempted to visit Les Catacombes, along with every under twenty-five-year-old, black clothes-wearing Goth in Europe, evidently. Mais, it was closed until the end of the month and had a posted notice about work being done on the air conditioning for the comfort of the public. Who cares? It's full of bones and skulls in there, anyway. How comfortable can anyone be?

Venice (1995)

2009-06-25T11:06:00.004-05:00

1:05 p.m.
I am speeding toward Venice in an air-conditioned, first-class compartment with doilies on the head rests and wood panels (shades of old movies!) full of Italian business men in handsome suits on their cellular phones.

2:45 p.m.
The Longest Day. Now some cryptic announcement (of course, most announcements in Italian are cryptic to me) that something is happening 15 kilometers and for our convenience present something at the station. I hope this message is not something important that I need to know. Taking my cue from the businessmen, who merely opened one eye to listen, nodded, and closed their eyes again, I think it is just an announcement of a slight delay due to something on the tracks. We stopped completely for a few minutes, but now we have resumed moving. But not rapido. I will return to my Italian fashion magazine.

5:30 p.m.
VENICE!
But what a huge hassle. There are one million rude, stupid, ugly American tourists pushing onto the vaporettos, breaking in line. They wouldn't try that at Six Flags Over Texas -- why in hell do they do it here? Once I got off the vaporetto at San Marco I followed the map in my hotel's brochure and got here easily. I cannot even tell you anything about Venice yet, except it sits on murky, dank water and you get everywhere by boat. I was so hot and sweaty when I finally got to my room that I took off my shirt and bra and unpacked in jeans, topless. Now I am lying naked on clean white sheets, writing in my journal, enjoying being totally alone and naked in Venice. I took my large white American wash cloth and gave myself a whore's bath. Sounds of an accordion playing one of the same melancholy melodies I play on my own accordion at home waft up to me. I have a blood orange I will eat when I finish writing this. I am a naked Odalisque, red-haired, eating a blood orange in Venezia this afternoon. I smell shit and decay down below in the grey water.

10:45 p.m.
Maybe I'm just exhausted now. Venice is very beautiful in the same way as Galveston -- lovely and sad like a beautiful woman who knows she's past her prime. Venice is the Vivien Leigh of Italy, Vivien Leigh as Blanche Dubois. It's a city that exists for tourism even more visibly than Florence. It's rather disgusting in a way, like the French Quarter is in New Orleans.

I will admit I am actually quite ignorant of exactly what it is I am supposed to see here except for the facades of the palazzos on the Grand Canal. I just want to wander for the first time in my life in a great city, totally alone.

I had only one great adventure tonight. Taking my cue from Katharine Hepburn in David Lean's film Summertime, I got all cleaned up and went down to the Piazza San Marco at sunset, to see the glittering mosaics flash gold in the setting sun. I set out to find the exact outdoor café where Katharine Hepburn's character had her drink, but there were three to choose from. It looked likely Caffé Florian was the right one, plus a quartet of musicians (bass, piano, violin and accordion) had begun to play there. So I got myself a table and ordered a Campari. The music was very beautiful, and well-played. I saw the very soulful accordion player, with a lazy eye wandering off in the opposite direction of its mate, had noticed me. He hammed it up, playing directly to me. At the first break he sign-language gestured to me to come up to the quartet's platform. They spoke a little English and were very sweet to me. The accordion player told me the pianist was in love with me and asked what I wanted to hear them play after their break, so I said the Moonlight Sonata. The pianist asked if I had a husband. I said, lying, "Yes. He is back at the hotel." The pianist asked, "Does he have a knife?" And I said, "No." Then he said, laughingly, "Well, I do!"

When they resumed, the musicians played a heart-breaking rendition of Moonlight, with the accordion dripping in on top. Then I left lira on the table to pay for my drink and headed back to my hotel in the dark, and, as I did, I heard the melancholy first bars of "Memory" from Cats following me. I love the outrageous theatricality of Italian men. These silly, flirtatious tributes become more important when one is a woman of a certain age.

+ + + + + + +

1:16 a.m.

My darling Mark, tonight, just now, I tried to get an outside line to telephone you but the hotel switchboard closed at midnight. I miss you most of all tonight, most of any time since my departure. Venice is the city of honeymooners and of lovers. I see them make their deep, probing soul kisses against the pillars of the Piazza, lovers of ever possible nationality. I rode the vaporetto tonight all the way around the Grand Canal as the lights came on in the upper stories of the palazzos all over Venice. This is the best, probably, that life has to offer us on this planet: sunset on Venice, as the dying rays of the sun glitter on the gold mosaics of the grand mansions and the cathedral. I cannot imagine anything more sublime. I see now why the writer (who?) said, "See Venice and die."

Venice is like me. It suits my personality: theatrical, does not suffer fools gladly, vain, hiding a black soul under a decorated exterior. Here the smell of raw sewage competes with the perfumes of designer boutiques.

You know how much I love to drive in a car at dusk back home and see inside people's houses as they turn on their lights. That's what I did tonight in Venice on the vaporetto on the Grand Canal. Cinematically, I saw families sit down to dinner three stories up under their Murano glass chandeliers colored like hard candies. I saw old women in aprons smoking cigarettes on balconies. I saw matrons come out, wiping their foreheads, from hot kitchens to get some fresh air.

I stopped tonight on the way home to the hotel for a final coffee at a tiny bar near the piazza run by a guy named Piero who lived in New York for a year and speaks great English. We had a great, rambling conversation, and then a young guy who works there offered me some of a birthday torte they were sharing, insisting that I drink spumante with them, since, evidently, in Italy it's de rigeur after cake. I stayed there a good long time talking with those two guys and an older man who is a vendor of verdura at the outdoor market. When I tried to say goodnight, they begged me to stay a while longer. A drunk English woman who lives on Lido warned me that even the guy who washes dishes at my hotel could unlock my room and be waiting inside for me. She made me paranoid and afraid that someone might follow me when I left the bar alone, even though my impression, my gut instinct was that everyone there was molto simpatico. When I did leave the bar I decided to start running to put some distance between me and anyone in the bar who might have bad ideas. The worst idea of all is running away in the black night in that labyrinth known as Venice. I soon found myself utterly and completely lost.

Venice, 1:00 a.m. "This is the end, beautiful friend..." The Doors played from somewhere above me as I ran further into the night, clutching my purse and passport, Don't Look Now, Death in Venice and every Dario Argento slasher movie ever made flashing before my eyes. Finally, breathless, I came upon an opening between buildings and two American girls from San Something, California, who bummed a cigarette from me and we chatted. I said goodbye to them and then, miraculously, turned a corner and immediately arrived at my hotel's front door. And here I am now, safe in my room. That's why I wanted to call home and hear your sweet voice.

I am losing my Eeeeeeengleesh after all these weeks not speaking it and I am starting to think and speak in a weird patois of French, Spanish and bad Italian that seems to work for me nearly everywhere I go. I am translating for people and it is working. It is really crazy. Ici en parle franglaisitaliano. I capisco. Tu me comprends? Si, si, claro, okay, bene.

This afternoon I toured the Doge's Palace and got strangely choked up at the grisaille illusionistic panels in the ceilings. Also double portraits with ribbons, strangely abstract and modern, like Mexican art. The white ribbons have writing on them, like wisps of smoke, like the jet-trail of sky-writing. I wanted to visit the cathedral but arrived fifteen minutes too late; I'll try again tomorrow. I am strangely uninterested in trying to beg or charm my way into the Biennale, or even to go to the Guggenheim. I am just too visually over-loaded. My optic nerves are throbbing. I have a visual headache. I couldn't care less about modern art here.

I saw the dark, dank prison cells under the Doge's Palace and the little hairs stood up on my arms. I smelled something I remember. I had past-life memories there. It gave me the willies.

I am very, very tired and will close, so sad that I cannot talk to you, but afraid to leave the hotel alone in the middle of the night to try to find a pay phone. I miss you so much, long to have you run your palms down my long back, and I am even too tired to touch myself tonight and think of you. In my dreams, domani, and my memories, ieri, I taste your mouth. Do you remember me? In Italy, they say my eyes are my best feature. Do you remember them? Can you still hear my voice inside your head? I will be with you again in two weeks, my darling husband, but tonight I say buona notte. Yesterday pigeons fighting in my window ledge woke me. Tonight I close the shutters. I am yours, my love, in Venice.

Before I leave here I will set fire to my photograph and drop it into the Grand Canal as a magic charm to insure I can return here one day. Or, if not, to insure that I will forever be a part of Venice from now on.

Assisi (1995)

2009-06-25T11:05:00.001-05:00

Assisi! Caro Dio! It's a holy place, like Jerusalem or the Vatican and tour buses from all over the world pile into its two major churches. it was a Diane Arbus scene: I saw nuns pushing the terrifically physically and mentally challenged in wheelchairs up steep ramps. I saw nuns holding the elbows of the near-dead. I saw dozens of elderly German, French and Italians debark from buses and go into Saint Francis' basilica expecting miracles, or at least to offer up a prayer.

The frescoes in St. Francis are startling and the most beautiful I've seen in Italy: flat, with crazy perspectives and bizarre iconography. Shapes I will remember: a bat-like shape bearing Jesus as he inflicts St. Francis with the stigmata, crockery raining down past the edge of a table, the hand of God and bat-like demons being driven out of Arezzo. To the left of the altar there is a fresco that has changed from positive to negative; that is, all the white paint has oxidized to black with time and vice-versa. Incredible. The ceiling has a dark blue ground with gold stars on it, but rain damage caused rings of turquoise to arise, like clouds, on the dark background. I got a strong feeling of this place being authentic and begin to tear up at the power of the third fresco panel I viewed. Then I went downstairs to see the crypt of St. Francis, but a very crowded Mass was being said. Like in La Dolce Vita, I saw pious women break off flowers from the altar flower arrangements at the crypt. I said my first prayer in Italy at the Chapel of the Magdalene and lighted a candle.

Then, off across town on foot for the church of Saint Clare and the cloisters of the Poor Clares. While waiting to go inside when the church reopened at 2:00 p.m., I wandered around the side into a beautiful courtyard through a wide-open gate. There were some striking architectural fragments displayed high up on a wall, which I photographed. Then, a young, tall, handsome Franciscan monk (wearing fabulous black leather sandals!) came by and told me nicely the space was private. Embarrassed, I apologized and immediately turned to leave. But then he said, good-naturedly, "Oh, come along with me," and took me to the third (outside) door of the cloister, inside which some seventy Poor Clares are cloistered under vows of silence for life. He showed me the window one would call at, in an earth-shaking family emergency, for the nun, and the tiny space, like a dumbwaiter elevator, where she would appear if summoned by the outside world. Then a tiny old nun, not a Clare, came up and proceeded to ream out the poor young priest in Italian, so I said my dispiaci and scooted. I put my hand on the door, the door through which Clares first pass when entering the cloister, or the final door of their exits, should they ever decide to leave as I fled. Poor young priest! I hope your kindness to me didn't cause you trouble!

Clare's church is much less grand that St. Francis. The frescoes are mostly obliterated by time. St. Clare's tomb, however, was intense, with her wax effigy laid out, and, behind bars, her ashes in an urn. Most intense of all was the performance of a nun, draped in sheer black, like an Arab woman, pacing back and forth in a cage in front of the glass cases containing the cloaks of Saints Francis and Clare. You put a coin up to the bars of the cage and the nun takes it from you and gives you a holy card in return. Between "customers" she paces and prays.

Assisi is almost blinding -- lots of white, quarried stone. Lots of embroidered baby and children's clothing displayed for sale everywhere: white, blue chambray, red or blue cross-stitch embroidery. Handkerchiefs.

At the end of the day, I went by bus to the church that contains St. Francis' meditation site. The church itself is overblown and wants to be French, like a wedding cake, with Lawrence Welk crystal chandeliers, but the tiny shed-like church inside the church was touching and seemed very real. Pious pilgrims knelt and prayed and wept. Assisi is a powerful, loaded place. Saint Francis' mojo is still working, hundreds of years later.

DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES

2009-06-24T12:26:00.001-05:00

Why Do I Stab My Mother? (1992)

2009-06-24T12:24:00.005-05:00

In my nightmare, I ask her to take a walk with me in the black, black night lit only by the moon. We find ourselves at the seaside, and I take her hand and lead her down, down an endless pier that stretches out into the violent ocean. She is so sweet and pleasant, surprised that I want to be with her. Her expression is so innocent. I take her to the end of the pier, and then I take out my long silvery knife, the kind of knife used to fillet fish. I grab her by the wrist, and, although she struggles, she cannot get away from me. I am too strong.

When I was a little girl I worshiped my mother. I was so proud of her when I compared her to other people's mothers at my school. She was the well-spoken one, the beautiful one, like a dove surrounded by crows. Even when we went to the grocery store people noticed how beautiful and kind she was, as if she were Snow White trailing a stream of happy singing flowers. Some nights she would come into my little bedroom to tuck me in before she and my father went to the opera. She was wearing a strapless evening gown and her jewels, her dark hair upswept in a French twist, and as she bent over to kiss me goodnight I could smell her perfume, Chanel No. 5. No, no, no! That is someone else's story that I read in a book, not my own! But still, my own mother was as lovely to me as that.

She gave me tea parties in the front yard with my little minature china tea set that came all the way from Germany. She sewed exquisite dresses with full skirts and sashes and lace for me. At Christmas, even though we were poor, she made sure Santa Claus brought me a doll with eyes that opened and closed. She made me birthday cakes with pink icing. She was always there when I came home from school and my father and she and I went to church every Sunday and she helped me to learn to say my bedtime prayers. She was a saint.

But then, something happened. My father got killed and she had to raise my sister and me by herself. I got tits and she was mad at me most of the time and I didn't know what I had done wrong. She had to work hard to make ends meet. She had to do without. Suddenly she hated all my friends and she wouldn't let me go out with boys. I saw her kissing strange men. My grades were only average, my curfew was 10:00 p.m., I began climbing out my bedroom window so I could have some freedom. I dropped out of college. I became a teenage bride. Nothing I ever did was good enough. She said I could have been someone, she said I threw it all away. Nothing I ever did was good enough. I hated myself for letting her down because I loved her so much. Nothing I ever do is good enough.

In my nightmare, I ask my mother to take a walk with me in the black, black night. We find ourselves at the seaside, and I take my mother's arm and lead her down, down an endless pier that stretches our over the violent ocean. She is so sweet and pleasant, surprised that I want to be with her. She is not as tall as I remember, and I see for the first time that her hair is going white. My heart plunges when I realize that she has gotten older. It hurts me to say it: my mother is old. Her face is glowing, like the moon, her expression is innocent. I take her hand and we walk together out to the end of the pier that stretches into eternity. Then I take out my long silvery knife, the kind of knife used to fillet fish. I grab my mother by the wrist, and although she struggles, she cannot get away from me. I am too strong. I am crying, but I cannot stop now. I stab her again and again although she pleads with me. I stab her even though she begs me not to and tells me that she loves me.

Why do I stab my mother? Why do I stab my mother? Why do I stab

Three Nightmares (2000)

2009-06-23T12:11:00.012-05:00

I. "You"" Is My Husband in My Dream.

You and I were on a Ferris wheel at an amusement park and the children were with us, but they were much younger. The car we road in was damaged; the lap bar kept detaching itself from its clasp with every revolution of the wheel and it seemed certain we would be thrown from the car to our deaths. I fought to keep the children in. The interminable ride was filled with terror for me, and each revolution of the wheel brought with it an unforeseen shock, as when one rides a roller coaster and it crests a new hill, then plummets. I saw that your mother sat in the car in front of us, alone. She turned her head and told me reassuringly, in the voice of experience, that the only hope was simply to close my eyes. She said that would make the ride less terrifying and it would seem to be over sooner. She said that was how she had managed. I was angry at you, since it was clear you knew the ride was not safe, yet you asked the children and me to go on it with you anyway. It seemed certain you knew the restraining lap bar was broken as you helped me into the car.

Then I dreamed I had separated from you and the small children lived with me in a trashy house with aluminum siding, like a trailer, on a military base. I was afraid that you would come and kill me and destroy my house because I had left you. I dreamed you followed me to art school then, that you tried to joke with my teachers about football and they didn't understand you. Then you told me you were going to the dance studio for a while "to try out a few steps." I thought, Why are you doing that? Dance was something that was mine alone. I wanted to leave the school, but the only way out forced me to pass through the mirrored studio in which you danced. I crept along the wall and tried to be as small and unobtrusive as possible so not to attract your attention.

The little children and I left the house so that we would not be in danger from your rage. I saw a bus stopped down the street and we ran for it. The children slowed me down. Another woman, also in her forties, ran, too, and was able to catch the bus just before it started off. I yelled to her to ask the bus driver to wait for us. My purse spilled over as we ran and my checkbook and the few dollars I had in the whole world spilled out. I had to backtrack a few feet to pick them up. Meanwhile the bus departed without us and something inside me knew for certain there would never be another one. Something inside me knew it was the bus that led to life as an artist. I closed my eyes and wept.

II. Dream of June 11, 1997.

I am reading a book called Flirt, but it is a serious psychology or philosophy book by a noted expert -- Jung? -- not something frivolous as the title implies. I only recall what was on one page: a list of half a dozen items, the first of which was

(1) Parallel encounter.

Then Mark, although he doesn't look exactly like Mark at some points in the dream -- more like an actor who's been cast to play him because he's the same physical type -- are in San Antonio in a big civic building, perhaps a neighborhood recreation center. Some kind of charity event or auction involving children is going on. There are dozens of young Hispanic children boisterously running around, and I remember brightly-colored, inflatable pool floats in the shapes of animals -- a hot pink crocodile or alligator -- as something either for sale or somehow decorating the festive setting. I feel happy to be there, like it is a fiesta or something, a friendly social environment. In one room with a stage and rows of folding chairs a nice, non-art world Hispanic father there with his children positively critiques a past performance of mine as if he and his children had been there when I'd performed in this space at some time in the past.

Mark is drinking beer, which is available from food and drink vendors' booths. He's been drinking heavily. Then we are in a big empty room in the facility, alone. We get into a fight, which escalates to the point that he breaks the beer bottle from which he is drinking and begins to slash me with it. I get defensive wounds in my palms and beg him to stop. When he won't and it becomes clear that I have to defend myself, I find a metal shard on the ground (the blade from a palette knife?) and begin to stab back with it, also severely wounding him, primarily in the hands. When I have wounded him severely, he finally stops coming after me. Although I am seriously wounded myself, I think, "I have to get help for Mark," and notice a telephone in the room. It's a beige, push-button phone, but the buttons are all wrong. There are only combinations of numbers (3-13-17 or 17-78, for instance). Since there are no numbers 9 or 1, I can't figure out how to operate the phone to call 911 for help. Although I am wounded I think I will live, but fear Mark will not unless I can get him medical attention right away.

Mark disappears from the room while I am trying to operate the telephone and I pursue him through the halls of the building until he goes outside. I follow him next door to a shabby room filled with garbage -- like a flophouse or crack house -- and then I see the room is attached to an elementary school. A passerby tells me the name of the elementary school and then I feel relief because, since I now know where I am, the ambulance will be able to locate us.

There is another man lying on the floor of the flophouse and he is dead, but he has no visible wounds, as if he has overdosed. I try to keep talking to Mark, to make him comfortable on the floor amid black plastic bags of garbage, to assure him I've sent for help. Despite the wounds on his hands he raises his shirt and tears his own torso open vertically, beginning at the navel. I have the eerie realization that his navel has a tooth in it, as if it is a mouth and will speak. When Mark rips himself open a torrent of white wine pours out of him, but no blood. And then he dies.

I know I will live on despite the terrible wounds Mark had inflicted on me.

III. A Bad Dream, January 28, 1996.

Even though in the dream, as in real life, Mark and I have been together fourteen years, I dream that I have to get married. The emphasis on marriage in this dream is bureaucratic, like some Soviet institutional policy, a regulation like filing one's income tax. I am neither happy nor sad, just resigned to the fact that it is required. Without any emotion at all I take out a straight razor and slit my own throat, but the blood does not flow outward where others are aware that I am bleeding to death; instead, it flows internally. I am conscious throughout the dream that the loss of blood will eventually kill me unless I seek medical intervention. To cover up my terrible self-inflicted wound I wear a neck scarf or a pearl choker throughout the dream.

I go to a kind of storefront, as directed, where middle-aged matrons in white uniforms and headdresses like nuns or nurses sign up a hundred brides on a first-come, first-served basis. The pads of paper the matrons write upon are double columned, so each woman who signs up is eventually randomly paired with another bride-to-be. The matrons explain this pairing with another woman will "make the wedding easier and less time-consuming," that the Justice of the Peace will see us two couples at a time during the ceremonies. The matrons pass out lists of of things each bride must accomplish before the wedding ceremony; this list consists of errands and gifts that must be purchased for various family members.

The only time Mark is with me in the dream is when I set out to accomplish some of the shopping errands. I become separated from Mark while shopping, and when I meet up with him again, he has a present for me -- this is one of the tasks on the list. He gives me three pairs of stockings or tights as a gift; they are all unusual colors and textures. One pair is like woolly chain mail, and I remember thinking that although they are beautiful, they aren't something I would have chosen for myself. I don't think they will match my clothes, but I don't tell Mark that. I think again of the mortal wound I have inflicted upon myself, but I don't mention it to Mark or start traveling to the hospital emergency room.

The next scene of my dream is backstage at the place where the weddings are to be performed. I arrive late, with gift-wrapped packages in my arms and Natasha's cherished doll, Cookie, who is all dressed up in a blue organdy and lace party dress. The backstage area is crowded with the other brides, who now also wear the white nun/nurse uniform, and all the brides' mothers. There are no men present at all, as if only the women are required to report to get married. My mother is there, sitting at a table weeping, alarmed, evidently that her daughter is late and fearful that she perhaps isn't going to come at all. When she sees me enter she jumps up and runs over to me and stops crying, relieved that I have finally arrived and happy to see me. I do not mention to my mother, either, that I have a self-inflicted fatal wound to my throat, and she does not notice it. I think I can't possibly have much longer to live with all the blood loss. And then, a noise outside the bedroom window startles me and I wake up from the dream.

Dreams and Nightmares from the Blue Journal (1975-76)

2009-06-23T12:09:00.003-05:00

Someone in my creative writing class turned in a poem which was a perfect parody of my work - syntax, images, line breaks. In it was the name "Sabia," which is in a story I have recently completed and not taken to class yet. My teacher tried to convince me that one of his student aides must have read my previous works on the duplicating stencils and parodied them as a practical joke. I told my teacher that no one could have known the name Sabia except me, and, when I said this, I felt a spirit move up into my body from my toes, as my own spirit was pushed out the top of my head. I went over to the typewriter and began to type - there was no paper in the typewriter. My teacher calmed the class and inserted a sheet of paper and I began typing madly. The teacher asked me if I could type in a normal state, and I answered, "Yes." I tried very hard to concentrate and explain to him that something malevolent was in possession of my body, and when I concentrated so hard, the spirit left out the top of my head and my own spirit flowed back in. I wasn't shown what I had typed. Automatic writing, like those spiritualists used to do, I suppose.

I left the class to find my husband, who was at the library. I felt cleared completely of the evil presence until I started walking down the aisles. A voice inside my head told me to go over and look between two books and I would find a $5 bill. I looked, and the bill was there, so I knew the spirit had not completely left me.

I found my husband, who was reading a book on cowboy art. I told him I needed urgently to talk with him. We went outside the library. I told him of the possession, and he panicked and deserted me. He threw me the car keys, slid his books toward me on the ground, and ran off. The dream ended.

+ + + + + + +

I dream there are spiders on the floor that bite the soles of my feet as I try to get out of bed.

+ + + + + + +

I dreamed of a tiny black-and-white cat, small enough to sit on the phone dial. I dreamed my dead uncle was dying again in my hotel room, and he looked exactly like my father. I wanted to get the desk clerk to give me another room, but I was continually thwarted. My family tried to make me stay in the room where he died.

+ + + + + + +

A dream in which someone said, "The great master shared the divine truth with his followers, his dentist and his vampires. Yes, there are a lot of vampires in India."

+ + + + + + +

I dreamed of a girl who was dying of cancer. Her family and husband were fabulously wealthy. They brought her beautiful things from all over the world to make her last months better. But still she died.

All the beautiful gifts were then put into a museum they built called the Requisitory. In the dream I was touring the museum. Its outside was very Bauhaus and modern, but with a bas-relief of running wild horses on it.

I remember one painting in particular: "Montmartre." It was big, with gold leaf JOB cigarette paper emblems around the outside, like a frame; details from a gothic paintings, in collage, were in the center of the work, like a jeweled miniature.

+ + + + + + +

I dreamed I was carrying a very heavy doll that looked exactly like a baby.

+ + + + + + +

An art show. The woman's work is being exhibited. The man, her husband, tires of the event and goes away to the house of his friend, a priest. The priest is standing on the edge of a pier. He asks the man if there are any good porn houses in the area. The man is shocked, but tries not to show it and says he must leave to get something to eat.

Back at the woman's art show, things have slowed down. The woman looks at a box of stereopticon slides she has brought along. Some of them are of erotic subjects. She thinks, You start off masturbating over literature and you never know where you will end up eventually. No need to fear ending with books. Your beauty changes. You play out things you read about. The burden of Little Lord Jesus and his sweet white flesh. I traded off my Bible for a book of pornography, and I have the papers somewhere to prove it.

in in in in n n

+ + + + + + +

Said in my dream by an old man, of his run-away daughter:
"When she came home to me she was poverty-stricken, disease-ridden and a vampire."

POEMS

2009-06-23T00:16:00.000-05:00

email from vien to mz daughter (2004)

2009-06-23T00:15:00.004-05:00

okaz imagine this is some kind of crazy cyber postcard from gertrude stein
i am tzping from a german computer and the kezboard is totallz differznt
who knew and i am too
visuallz and mentallz and pszchicallz overloaded
to waste anz precious computer time trzing to figure it out
spending so manz dazs in
bella italia speaking onlz italian and now being
in the blinding upright
heroic wien with its implausiblz longsigns
with not enough vowels is
plazing havok with mz overlzfull mind.

so

italz alwazs and eternallz was sublime.
milano still fullz of impossiblz beautiful people and
chic shopping and fastcars.
veneyia as
spectacularlz moving as it has been for eons
to poetic tzpes like me, and i have
treasures for all of zou like some intrepid
female marco polo.

wien
i am not so sure at all. i came into sudbahnhof
after a heidi train ride
on the tail end of the orient express through tunnels dznamited through
the alps ears popping temperature dropping.
the station was like
a metaphzsical de chirico painting miles of track
deserted and i all alone with mz baggages and the first atttack of
homesickness in the vandaliyed phones graffitti urban grit. i am thinking have i made a mistake
to leave bella italia

so

i will return in a week and regale zou with tales
from third man surreal
unmappable landscape and aunschloss and polite upright people und sisi
and the summerpalace and tragic rudolf and his kniye cologne. i am so
not a germanic person. mazbe zou alreadz knew this.

i must stop now. all love to zou all and i see zou soon in the fuck
usa.

dessiminate as zou see fit
for I will not trz again to tzpe on the
infernal german kezboard.

now, we are alone

mz sweet darling daughter,

i miss zou so much and cannot wait to see zou.
mz luggage is
going to be heartache and i will check through the fake fendi bag and hope it holds up with onlz mz clothes in it. the other
bag is full of shopping and souvenirs of the trip for zou and everzone.
i will be so happz to see zou, mz sweet sweetie.
zesterdaz it was
cold and rainz. it was so depressing
i wanted to sit down somewhere
and crz mz umbrella fighting me like a deranged bat
so i went in the verz famous loos american bar zou
can look for it on the googlesearch and see it ws heaven onlz 14
spaces inside and no one but me and the verz thin chic black clothes
female bartender and hotjazz plazing.
so i bought the right to the
architecture with the price of one kaffee melange and stazed there
writing in mz journal and smoking a cigarette
until mz spirits were
normal again.

oh mz babz i still dont know about vien. i have a tremendous sense of
being outsider here. the american student girls
think all of this is verz normal and are not much suffering
from cultureshock because evrzone speaks english. but i sense an
underlzing current, a hzpocrisz here i find verz unnerving and a verz
real sense of classism.
no, i could not spend much time in this
unnerving citz of borrowed architectural forms, pillaged works of art
and fake italian ruins. it is not mz proverbial cup of kaffee.
somepart of me, mz genetic memory, is verz frightened here. strange.

so it is even colder todaz and raining again.
mz clothes are all stinkz mustz and i cannot wait to be home to wash them. i feel like a charlie chaplin refugee. i will kiss zour sweet
face a million times when zou pick me up at the airport and think all
good thoughts that mz plane won‰t be delazed.

all mz love
zur fleidermom

London, England: February 2004

2009-06-23T00:14:00.000-05:00

Look left
Cockfosters
Mind the gap
Way out
No Busking

Pollock's Toy Theatres
Oxford Street Old and New Bond Streets
Jermyn Street Saville Row
bespoke double-breasted pinstripe suits
co-respondent shoes
wingtips
long black vicuna topcoats
shades, briefcases, shaved heads
knickers
Liberty
Harrod's

The Savoy
Charles Dickens' House
Fleet Street
Cannibal murderer on the newstand now
My Fair Lady
The Tate Modern
Sir John Soan's
St. Pancras Old Church

Waterloo Bridge

godshite bastard
fecking
gobsmack'd
wanker
cream tea
cucumber and Stilton sandwiches
shortbread
odd crisps
curry takeaway

The British Museum: sketching of a Sunday afternoon

Bombay sapphire
so as not to scare the children
a pair of hotel keys flung on a bar table
swooped up and carried to the lift
later that night
ices squash and chocolates are available from attendants
drinks for interval may be ordered in advance from theatre bars
Noel Coward
West End
anything goes
a wake
and I am told I resemble Evita Peron

scary lost after dark in Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury
rescued by neon Tavistock and Russell Square

the final words I utter before getting into the London cab
(the Knowledge)
it's like the ending of Grand Hotel

Dublin, Ireland: February 2004

2009-06-23T00:13:00.001-05:00

I re-read Joyce's The Dubliners on the flight over

St. Stephens Green
Ha'Penny Bridge
O'Connell Bridge
North/South of the Liffey
Protestant/Catholic
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Yeats and Maud Gonne
The General Post Office (bullet holes)
Dublin is a city of famous statues
Oscar Wilde
the floozy in the jacuzzi
the tart with the cart
the girls wore flowers in their hair in February
aye
nye
red doors
hello, lady, what'll you have?
Bewley's Tea House since 1927 brown sugar cubes scones and clotted cream
Guinness
Jameson
Schweppe's Potass and Lethia

fish market
The Gaiety!
a claddaugh, silver

The Mother Birds (1991)

2009-06-23T00:11:00.002-05:00

-- For Nicholas, For Natasha

When my first-born entered the world
through an opening in my body
I did not even know how to hold him.

No maternal instinct like the knowing
bitch's to tongue her puppies off and even gnaw
away the umbilical cord that joined her
offsprings' lives to hers
informed me. I, a member of the reading breed,
for once did not know
did not know anything at all about
what a mother is supposed to do,
so I held my poor first-born like some
crazy running back desperately clutching
a football
as he dodges and darts down the playing field
to score a touchdown.

The beaming delivery room nurse
who presented my first child to me
deposited him sunnily in my outstretched arms
surely would not have done so had she known about
the glaring blank panic
behind my eyes in my mind,
the mind that had read a hundred
how-to-do-it baby books
and now, in practice, knew absolutely nothing at all
about this life of the body.
In privacy, then, in my own room,
I tried to put him to my nipple as I had been told I should do
but the poor child could not latch on. He clenched his eyes
shut against the terrifying brightness of the
hospital room. Poor little stranger to this light and
arid exterior world of ours, I thought, as my eyes filled
with tears for him,
thinking how homesick he must now be and how
outside me forever, out of my wise body which had,
so far, always known exactly what to do for him.
I wept.
After a while, exhausted, both of us dozed; he,
bundled in my arms.
And then a miracle happened in our sleep:
somehow he nosed his way past the blue hospital gown
to my breast, and nursed.

When I see the mother birds, even after
these dozen years, I feel inadequate. How do they know the ways
of mothering, how do they read it in their blood?
How do they find faith to push their babies from the nest
even as cats pretend to sleep in dappled shadows below?
I watch in admiration as a tiny wren crams a bit of food from her own beak
deep down the throat of her offspring, already a full three-quarters
her own size.
The baby bird beats its wings in anticipation and lets out shrill,
insistent cries. It seems to be impatient with its mother.
It wants so much to eat and live.

The Years of Dancing and Falling (1986)

2009-06-23T00:11:00.000-05:00

-- for Mark

at first it seemed we were always
dancing and falling
then only falling or you did the
falling and I did the dancing

years of Mexican beer expensive magazines antibiotics holy cards mescal chartreuse overdue library books homemade soup gin French wine new tennis shoes nightmares black and white movies a small fortune in coffee and cigarettes African bracelets records lost cats dope anti-depressants black panties postcards from Europe bad scotch cool t-shirts flowers from Safeway skinny braids grown and cut off lost earrings beds unmade paintings unpainted writing unwritten cockroaches blaming and drinking and fucking and talking and dancing and falling
tattoos that mean absolutely nothing to our new lovers
scars

you got me pregnant and runny as brie
she tickled in my belly during 8 1/2 and afterward
we drank coffee at a sidewalk cafe and walked home young and cold and
careless our breath coming out like dreams
i came to you so hard that night
she came on so hard and huge i only wanted
drugs and when they cut her out you gazed in rapture at my
insides and could have slipped your hand in me and touched
my liver my kidneys my spleen my heart (O Baudelaire!)

and how you came home to find her sleeping on my tit
t.v. blaring bluely in the night or my ass in the air and you
big daddy-o buzzed and smelling of food. did you walk
by the river for hours then before you came home?
when did i begin to wake feeling i was drowning when
did my bones begin to dream of the desert and a highway leading
infinite to the horizon? when did you start to drive so fast?

the years of laundromats of paychecks of broken-down cars your
grassy muscled thighs your body pulling me hard against you
your splendid bullish head your eyes the smell and taste of you. our life.
the years of falling

will i tell our lovechild the fatal star x'd lovers Byron version of
melancholic opium expatriation and ruin imported beer psycopath
fantasies killing dreams and nights so dark you couldn't find your
soul or shall i tell her the truth that after a while
we couldn't even see each other?
that if we had been animals we might have mated for a season in some sheltered
shady place king and queen of beasts and she our
happy clambering cub

(or how you must have seen it in my eyes)
and about how the rest came after and now we sleep in
different houses different beds no beds and how
i wish you well and whole no movie actor dying
on the highway

she sits at the sunny morning table eating
cheerios while I smoke myself awake and i am
thinking of those hard-lived and gone days of
dancing and falling

True Saints of the Texas Panhandle (1982)

2009-06-23T00:10:00.001-05:00

-- for Mark

my heart was pounding like the
burnout engine of a 57 chevy
i got in your life like it was a
stolen car. i never looked back.
the radio was playing
whiney gospel music.
if we had a saint, it was the
plastic dashboard kind.

your tattoo was my engagement ring
i married you with one deep kiss
& later on route 66

dashboard lights illuminating our
desire headlights illuminating the horizon
of dreams

you told me once i made you sing
like a lost boy in a choir.
they said we sinned. your love's
my real-life church

& the fruit of my womb
is as sweet as baby Jesus
& has your eyes

show me the saint
who can make us love forever

(shrine)

double exposure (1980)

2009-06-23T00:09:00.000-05:00

one photograph in particular
i remember.
he is sitting on a bed
it looks like an insane asylum
but this is before
the afternoon in Amsterdam
when i was conceived
my mother a polite, pocket-sized nude

and here i see his face in mine.
the shaded eyes, the telling nose,
the hair, his lips
(his thighs)
i see myself
a living shrine,
the daughter

of my
dead father.

the artist's model (1979)

2009-06-23T00:08:00.000-05:00

once, as a child,
you visited Atlanta.
there was a black porter
in the windowless hall
of the neon hotel
unlocking doors.

one churchless evening
you & your mother walked by a window
full of vases made in the shape of
lovely women.
you would not stiffen, but turned
turned and fiercely stared
with your adventuress eyes.
that evening you imitated a woman
in a black dress.
the grownups were amused.

years later you understood
with childhood hair you understood
the Monday morning roll of bills,
the black man unlocking doors.
with hair the color of a childhood sweetheart's
and fierce, fierce eyes you

were made into a vase the shape
of lovely, lovely women.

once you dreamed (1978)

2009-06-23T00:07:00.000-05:00

-- for Littlejohn

a church.
white, hot,
narrow.
you waited for a bride.
she was not coming.

you married.
her eyes met yours.
that evening
there were wedding sheets.

years pass.
(her eyes meet yours)

your bride
is coming down the street;
her dress is white,
white as the sheets
from your wedding bed

(the flowers in her hands & hair
are red

red)

black & white love poem (1977)

2009-06-23T00:05:00.002-05:00

you spent years
learning to hate yourself.
now let me love you for just a
while
before you go away to appear in
modern movies.

(i love your amber eyes
your tough, vaudevillian stance
your hands left over from some
Celtic romance)

i see you in sequel
playing punk to mirror
seeking black eye from magician
smile from sniper
disapproval from someone
cold, hard
like your father.

(i love to see you laugh)

in the last reel
i see your mobile back
black-jacketed
heading for the door.

(my love a useless, lacy thing
discarded on the floor)

monument to running water (1974)

2009-06-23T00:04:00.004-05:00

-- for Vladimir Nabokov

someone should build monuments to running water,
sing jewelry to its Siberian quicksilver,
melt diamonds and cast sculptures to its blaze.

someone should make a shrine of words:
call running water lingual, soul-colored, brittle,
mercury-skeined.

a monolith of glass should be erected to
celebrate its combed surface

i
could spangle an obelisk.

the moving van that takes you to the ghost town (1973)

2009-06-23T00:04:00.003-05:00

walking the empty streets
to empty town
i am interested in the back
pockets of empty men
headed for the breakfast counter
some have morning papers
or red man chewing tobacco
or the day's cigarettes
the waitress asks them how they are
they don't know
i am a stranger in your strange town
& the reason there are silver specks
in your sidewalk is fairy snow

o yes
o no

i got here so early this morning
that i saw the
businessmen unlock the
monetary system and the
sleeping merchandise

your windows are filled
with stainless steel
and wondrous lacy reasons
to be married
your mannequins
watch me from the corners
of their eyes

an old man says good morning out loud
and with his cane
i look to see if he means me;
he does.
he is already halfway down the street
before i answer
i hope he did not think
i was a lost daughter
(stolen laughter)

i am alone
except for crickets
making sidewalk music

i rub my fingers together
and the music i make
is small

one word
(whispered)

alone.

SHORT STORIES

2009-06-22T00:10:00.001-05:00

"A Childhood" is a suite of drawings that accompanies or illustrates some of the Borger stories.

Dick, Jane and Sally Dresses (1995)

2009-06-22T00:09:00.004-05:00

Drive past the Piggly Wiggly where Mother guys groceries. Drive all the way down the street past the old brick school where Daddy was precinct chairman and had to stay up until the middle of the night in the school cafeteria with the American flag, counting ballots once they were removed from the padlocked metal boxes. Take the next left-hand turn. You notice immediately that the car is riding differently. It is because these streets are not paved. These streets are packed dirt, caleche the color of rust. The houses on this street are tiny, really not much more than shacks. Very few of them are even painted. You pass the grocery store for this neighborhood, a shack about the size of a boxcar, weathered wood with a tattered screen door and a wooden bench out front and two round red tin Coca-Cola advertising signs. Daddy says to push down the button on the door where you are sitting in the back seat, looking out the window. He reaches over the front seat, strains around to lock the door of the back seat behind him while he keeps on driving. This is one of the streets where only black people live. You see chickens scratching in the dirt in someone's front yard. It is Easter morning and you have just finished searching out all the hard-boiled eggs your parents dyed with food coloring for you and hid in the back yard. This year, your favorite egg was pale, spring green and had a decal of a lily on it. You wonder if the children who live on this street have finished finding all their eggs by now, but you don't see a soul outside. Something fluttering catches your eye. By the front door of one of the houses, a rough wooden cross, hammered together from two planks, is rooted in the dirt. But the cross is wearing a flowered, full-skirted Easter dress, a dress about the same size as the Sunday dress you yourself are wearing there in the back seat of your parents' car. The cross is wearing a little girl's dress like a scarecrow and that is what caught your eye. Your father continues driving down the dirt road. In a couple of blocks, when the street runs out at the intersection with a paved road and your father turns left again, you realize that you are at the far end of your very own street, that your father has taken a different route home than usual.

*****

In first grade we are learning to read from books about Dick and Jane, a brother and sister our age, and Sally, their yellow-haired baby sister. Dick, Jane and Sally live on a tree-lined street in a house nicer than ours because theirs is brick and has a garage. I am pleased to see that Jane and Sally wear dresses exactly like the ones Mother sews for me: tiny neat prints with white Peter Pan collars, puffed sleeves, buttons all the way down the back, a sash to tie into a bow, full, gathered skirts that billow above my knees when I run. My teacher notices the pretty dresses Mother makes for me and when a reporter wants to do a story with photographs for the Sunday newspaper, my teacher tells him about me. The reporter comes to our house with a photographer, and they ask me to spread out all my Dick-Jane-and-Sally dresses on my bed and hold one up, pretending as if I am trying to decide which one to wear to school that day. A flashbulb goes off, blinding me. I refuse to look into the camera again during subsequent shots.

Daddy drives the car. Mother sews my dresses on her sewing machine. Daddy steps on the gas pedal in the floorboard and the car speeds forward. Mother steps on a pedal on the floor, and the sewing machine whirs. If I stand right next to her and watch the needle go up and down, I can see the row of stitches looks just like the yellow stripes that whiz by when we drive down the highway. Mother is sewing highways into my pretty dresses. Mother is making me dresses that will take me somewhere.

Mother is making me new dresses because I am always growing, even if I'm not aware of it and don't want to. She can't even get my favorite blue dress from last year to button on me, and now I will have to give it to the poor. I love this dress and my eyes fill with tears. Mother tells me to straighten up, that I am being silly. She will make me new dresses that I will like just as well as my old ones. She cleans out my closest to make room for the new things, bags up all my outgrown dresses in brown paper grocery bags. It is Thanksgiving and time to take a cardboard carton of canned goods and a turkey to those less fortunate than we are.

Daddy drives us in the car to one of the unpaved dirt streets behind our house. We pull up in front of a weathered house with a high front porch and rickety wooden steps leading up to it. Mother and I hang behind while Daddy carries the carton up the steps to the front porch. He knocks at the door screen, and a black man wearing a white shirt and a tie and a blue dress suit answers. I recognize him as the preacher at our sister church, a church where only black people can go. It is cold and my breath comes out like smoke. The preacher smiles and shakes hands with Daddy. He invites the three of us inside where we can get warm, but Daddy says we can only stay a minute. We have only come to bring this box of groceries. The preacher's children push past him and come out on the porch to get a look at me. There are six or seven of them, and they smell like copper pennies. They are fascinated with my yellow hair and one of the older girls runs her fingers through it. I want to go inside and play with them in their front room. I can see, through the door screen, their mother standing with her arms crossed, the oval of a hooked rug on the wooden floor planks and an old-fashioned pot-bellied stove with a stove pipe. Mother hands the preacher's wife the brown grocery bags that contain my outgrown clothes. The preacher and his wife thank my parents, and then it is time for us to go. As we make our way down the rickety steps I can tell from the crackle of brown paper that the children have already begun to go through the bags of my old dresses. They are probably disappointed. They probably hoped there were some toys in there.

*******

Some time deep that winter, our teacher takes our class to the windowless audio-visual room to watch a movie. We sit crowded together in folding chairs and wait, squirming, while the teacher tinkers with the projector. The new girl in our class sits next to me. She started school late, after the weather had already turned cold, and she is behind in her school work. She is very quiet, so silent that the rest of us usually forget all about her. She is not from our town. She is not from anywhere, because she is the child of migrant farm workers. She is puny, so tiny that she seems to be at least a year younger than the rest of us. And she is pale, so white that I can see blue blood vessels through the transparent skin of her fragile wrists. The bones of my own wrists seem thick compared to hers. But I have the benefit of a father who works all he wants to in the oil field and suppers complete with meat and two vegetables and milk every night. The migrant girl's hair is white-blond, so light it is almost colorless, like the silk inside an ear of corn. Because I go to church on Sundays and am a Christian, I decide to act friendly and try to get her to talk to me while we wait for the movie to start. She tells me before she came to our school she and her mother and father and brothers and sisters followed the wheat all the way to Canada, living in the back seat of their car. Her father is hoping to find some work in the oil field so they can winter-over here until spring.

The migrant girl wears a white sweater with pearl decorations coming off of it, a dressy evening sweater intended for a grown lady. I notice that she keeps her arms folded just-so as she talks. Finally our teacher has the big reel of film loaded properly and the lights are switched off and the movie begins. It is a pearly black and white one, a movie of a play by Shakespeare, the one with the "alas, poor Yorick" skull in it. After the film is well underway I steal a sidelong glance at the migrant girl. She has relaxed in the darkness and she watches the movie images flicker open-mouthed, as if it is hard for her to breathe, as if she is all worn out and getting sleepy. Her arms have slipped down, uncrossed, and I see that her poor white sweater bears a black scorch on its front, as if it had been burned. Her sweater smells funny.

After the movie is over, late in the afternoon when it is time for us to bundle up and go home, I look for the migrant girl again. She has no warm coat waiting for her on a hook in the hallway. Instead, she pulls her scorched, white sweater tighter around her, puts her chin down against the bitter wind, and strikes off into the cold early darkness of the winter evening. I watch her walk toward the round black car that waits at the curb out front of school. When her mother opens the car door to let her in, a baby in diapers tumbles out.

That evening I ask Mother if I can go though my closet again and find more outgrown clothes to give to the poor. She reminds me that we have given all my old things to the preacher's children, and that the dresses I have left fit me fine and I need them myself. I beg her to at least let me have an old coat, and she finally agrees to let me take my sky-blue parka from last winter. I put it in a paper grocery bag, and the next morning, start off to school with it early. I get to the classroom before anyone else and stuff the bag into the migrant girl's desk so she will find it when she comes to class. Then I sit at my own desk and play dumb.

When the migrant girl arrives, I watch as she discovers the bag. She opens it, looks inside, and, with a startled, confused look, closes the bag back up and stashes it under her desk. When school ends that day I lag behind the others to watch her put on my old coat. But she doesn't. Instead, she clutches her own white sweater with the scorch tighter around her, and heads out, chin down, into the cold. It is obvious to me that the migrant girl believes there has been a mistake. She knows the coat does not belong to her. My heart aches, but I can't figure out another way to give the little girl my old coat without her knowing it is Charity. Eventually, I suppose, the teacher must have taken the grocery bag containing my old coat down to the school office to Lost and Found because when she asks who it belongs to, none of us claims it.

As I lie in my clean safe bed in my own bedroom in the house I have always lived in, I cannot fall asleep. A lump rises in my throat when I think of the colorless and puny daughter of migrant farm workers and her burnt sweater. I feel guilty about my nice home-made Dick, Jane and Sally dresses with the sensible, tidy prints and white collars. My heart hurts.

And then, something bad happens to me. I lose my own cashmere bunny hood with seed pearl decorations sewn onto it as I walk home from school one day. I call to it on the windy bluff until it is getting dark, frantically, hysterically, as if it is a lost pet. That night, once again, I cannot get to sleep. And when I finally do, I am haunted by dreams of pitiful white furry things cold and alone and scared outside in the night.

Superstition (1984)

2009-06-22T00:09:00.002-05:00

If You Want to See Her Alive, Don't Leave Her Alone Here (1995)

2009-06-22T00:08:00.001-05:00

There were certain people my Southern grandmother called "characters" and these were the people from my childhood who made lasting impressions on me. Characters are those people you come across in real life who are somehow larger-than-life. Characters are like people you've read about in books or seen in the movies, non-conformists in some way, creating themselves. All my life I've loved meeting anyone described to me in advance as "a character."

One of the characters who made a deep and lasting impression on me, although she was only in my life during the 1962 school year, was a teenage foster child Mimi and Grampa took in. Her name was Wanda and she had been removed from her parents' home because, although ostensibly operating a beauty shop, Wanda's mother and two older sisters had been accused of engaging in, from time to time, what is euphemistically referred to as "the world's oldest profession." Mimi's Southern accent caused me to believe, until I was about twelve and finally saw the word in print, that these women were called "horas," or, simply, "holes." My confusion was compounded when I learned to play a dance tune which was also called a "hora" on the piano. I pictured Wanda and her family unjustly prevented by The Law from holding lively dances at their house of beauty.

Wanda, who must only have been about thirteen, wore her hair in a high bouffant with one foot-long sausage curl hanging off the side. She accomplished this hairstyle with a can of hair spray, a rat-tail comb and hours of labor in front of the mirror "ratting" her hair. Mimi attempted to convince Wanda to adopt the less extreme and more girlish hairstyle of her classmates, but to no avail. Wanda applied forbidden make-up as soon as she was safely out of Mimi's house -- the Cleopatra eyeliner and sky blue Maybelline eye shadow so popular in the Texas Panhandle in those days. She adopted the radical fashion statement of wearing three pairs of bobby socks at the same time, rolling all three socks down together so that she achieved a kind of Minnie Mouse ankle doughnut roll. She wore an ankle bracelet on one leg. She had several homemade tattoos on her arms, jail house tattoos, I believe they're called, of boys' names or three-letter initials. I enjoyed sleeping over some Friday nights at my grandparents' house that year. Wanda ratted and styled my hair, applied make-up to my face and gave me tips about boys while we ate lemons with salt and watched a horror movie on television. Mimi and Grampa had turned in early.

Mimi bought Wanda a pair of utilitarian silver eyeglasses, which Wanda promptly flushed down the toilet after having been refused the black rhinestone-encrusted cat's eye glasses she preferred. Wanda cheerfully but firmly refused to do her homework. Wanda climbed out her bedroom window and disappeared into cars with tail fins like rockets. The school called sometimes to say that Wanda had disappeared from class. Wanda came home much later than expected. Wanda's tasteful cashmere sweater with pearl buttons disappeared, and a battered black leather jacket made for a man appeared in its place. Wanda was hauled to church to attend wholesome youth meetings, but she seemed to dislike the kids she met there and made no effort at all to fit in.

I went with Mimi one night to take Wanda home to her family for the Christmas holidays. I remember waiting for someone to come to the door of the beauty shop, delighted with the artificial Christmas tree in the front window, thickly flocked in white and bearing bulbs filled with colored water that bubbled up. Wanda's father, a balding, nondescript scrawny man, opened the door and we entered the shop. Wanda's mother and older sisters were sitting in a row in the pink upholstered chairs with drying hoods tilted back, waiting. Wanda's mother and sisters resembled each other strongly, all amazingly plump and fully inflated and pink and white, like women in a painting by Fragonard. Each had a high, stiff bouffant coiffure: the mother's black, one daughter's fiery red, one daughter's platinum blond. I thought all three of them very beautiful and envied Wanda as her sisters eagerly pulled her behind the flowered curtain that separated the beauty shop from the family's private living quarters. Wanda didn't even look back to tell Mimi goodbye as she was led away -- something good was cooking back there on a gas stove -- and then we were let out by Wanda's slightly bent-over father, who had never uttered a single word.

My father managed a large tenement-style apartment complex in those days, and it had many vacant units. Once, after school, Wanda took me to an empty second floor apartment. It must have been early spring, because bright white light beamed through the window-glass, projecting a four-across, sixteen-square pattern like a checkerboard on the floor. We waited for what seemed like hours in the unheated living room of the empty apartment until one of Wanda's boyfriends showed up. Then she and he went into the bedroom and left me all alone, sprawled out on the floor in my blue parka. I could hear their voices and Wanda's giggles for a time, and then they emerged. Wanda's boyfriend was trying to convince her that I could be held for ransom, and that my family would pay money to get me back. He began to plan the necessary details out loud. Wanda was silent.

Then, she looked at him and looked at me and flatly announced she was taking me home because she wanted a Coke. Her boyfriend didn't protest, and Wanda and I left, our footsteps echoing down the wooden staircase. At the bottom of the stairs I impulsively stuck my hand into one of the bank of tin mailboxes in the hall and pulled it out bleeding. The cut was small, but I remember the smell and taste of my own blood as I sucked my fingers and Wanda and I walked home without speaking.

Mimi's Christian patience with Wanda ran out late in the spring, exhausted, perhaps, by Wanda's endless class-cutting, a shoplifting incident and her uncompliant nature. At the end of the school year she was returned to her folks in the beauty shop. Later we heard she had been sent away to a home for girls who were troublesome. I drew a picture of her with the letters "JD" on her front; "JD" for "juvenile delinquent." I tried my hand sometimes at composing ransom notes for myself from letters and words ripped out of the newspaper or an old Sears catalog. Even later we heard Wanda had escaped from the home for girls (here I picture her in prison garb, running beside a one-lane asphalt road in the Everglades) and when she was located and returned to the home, she was pregnant. I pictured Wanda shamelessly and hugely pregnant in a blue prison work shirt, later giving birth to twin girls.

We never learned what ultimately became of Wanda. Something in me wants to believe that she eventually became a full-fledged "character." I sincerely think I saw a resistance and determination in her that was deeper, more fundamental than a caricature Bad Girl's rebellion. I just hope she didn't become a victim in a trailer house somewhere. Maybe she fell in love with a handsome mechanic and is probably a grandmother by now.

I'll always remember Wanda. Sometimes I still practice composing ransom notes for myself with words and letters I rip out of newspapers and magazines.

The Figurines (1995)

2009-06-22T00:07:00.006-05:00

Mother and I pay a visit to an elderly lady from our church. As we drive up to her house I can see she is well off because her house is made of brick and an old Cadillac is parked in her driveway. Mother rings the door bell. The old woman answers and shows us in. Her lovely old Victorian living room furniture, probably inherited from her ancestors in the Deep South, is upholstered in dusty rose-colored velvet. She has gone to all the trouble of polishing her silver tea service and setting out cookies for us. Mother and the elderly lady settle in to visit. I walk around the room in a daze, admiring the old woman's treasures, her collection of dozens of porcelain figures of ballerinas which stand on lace doilies on the polished surfaces of many small tables. The old lady watches me and smiles; she can see that I am keeping my hands to myself, holding one of my small wrists in the opposite hand behind my back, as if I have to forcibly restrain myself from touching.

Then my dream comes true. The old lady says, "You may have your favorite." I look at my mother in disbelief and I can see she already starting to shake her head No, as if to tell me with a coded look that I must be polite and say, "Oh, no, I couldn't!" although I want one of the porcelain ballerinas more than I have ever wanted anything in my young life. My heart races. Everything could go wrong. But then the precious old woman says again, "Please, dear, choose the one you like best and you may take it home with you." Mother starts to say it is too much, that we can't accept, but the old lady is up from her chair now, pointing out her own favorites to me with a yellowed, trembling finger. I look back again at Mother and am relieved to see she's decided to let me have one of the figurines. It is so hard to choose. It is the most difficult decision I've ever had to make in my life. Finally I settle on a ballerina in a short white tutu, with black hair and feathers attached to her headdress as if she is Pavlova in Swan Lake. This is the happiest day of my life.

The old woman wraps the figurine up for me in Kleenex and a page from the newspaper for safe-keeping. When Mother and I get home, I go into my room and unwrap my treasure. It is the most beautiful thing I own. It is the most exquisite thing I have ever seen. I could never even have dreamed up such a thing as lovely as this ballerina, and now it is mine to keep in real life. I place it carefully in the very center of my dresser, beside my cardboard jewelry box. When I need to get a pair of socks or panties from my top drawer, I hold my breath, sliding the drawer of my dresser out gently, gently.

Months pass. I forget to be careful and close the top drawer of my dresser too roughly, and the ballerina falls. One pale arm, extended en arabesque, breaks off. I cry so long and so hard I become hysterical. Mother tells me to hush, that Daddy will fix it when he comes home from work. And, sure enough, after supper, Daddy gets out a tiny tube of glue, the smell of which makes me dizzy and light-headed, and he repairs the fragile ballerina. I am full of joy. I have a second chance. I can't even tell where Daddy rejoined the two pieces of my ballerina's arm. The mend is invisible.

But something goes wrong. After a few days, in the sunlight, I see the glue has yellowed and a bead, like a drop of amber tree sap, deforms the pure, lyrical line of the ballerina's delicate arm. She is broken. I broke her, and she will never be unbroken again. Even if no one else knows the ballerina is broken, I do. I know she is no longer perfect.

Now I don't take special care when I slide the dresser drawer open and shut. Sometimes something bad in me says, Just get it over with now, and I bump my hip into the dresser clumsily. Then one day while I am playing on the floor of my room, I bump into my dresser and the ballerina is knocked off-balance again. She topples. This time her legs are broken at the knees. My heart races. My face is hot, my pupils dilated, but I don't cry this time. No, this time I won't ask Daddy to repair her. I wrap the broken ballerina up in toilet tissue and secretly put her in the garbage can at the curb.

*******

Mother and I ride a chartered Greyhound bus all the way from Texas through the Deep South with the group of teenage church girls my mother chaperones. I love the drugging smell of the diesel exhaust fumes that come out of the bus's blackened tail pipe. I love eating surprise box lunches and pulling into deserted bus terminals in the middle of the night in strange towns whose names I don't even know, and it doesn't matter anyway, because I will probably never return there. I love not sleeping in my own bed and getting breakfast by pulling silver knobs on vending machines.

We stop in Atlanta for the night. The chartered bus pulls up in front of a shabbily genteel brick hotel that stands several stories high. It has a neon sign on top. I have never seen skyscrapers before, and looking up at them gives me vertigo. There is a black man wearing a uniform with shiny buttons and epaulets who takes our suitcases up to our room and unlocks the door for us. There are two glasses wrapped in white paper on a little glass shelf in the bathroom. Mother and I take turns taking cool baths and put on fresh summer dresses against the heat. The whole time we are dressing, and, in fact, the whole night we stay in this hotel, sirens are crying, growing closer, fading away into the distance, growing closer again. Mother and I go downstairs in the elevator. We are going to walk somewhere close by and eat dinner at a restaurant where there is air conditioning and we can get tall Cokes with crushed ice.

After we leave the hotel we soon pass by a plate glass window with a deep display area behind it, just at my eye level. In the window are dozens of porcelain vases made in the shapes of naked women. The women's bodies are beautiful and just as delicate and exquisite as my figurine of a ballerina. Mother follows my gaze to see why I have stopped short in front of this window, and when she sees what I am looking at, she clamps a hand onto my wrist and tries to pull me away. Mother's cheeks are flushed, but I am not embarrassed at all. As she tugs me along after her, I turn my head and fiercely stare at the vases made in the shapes of lovely, lovely women.

Places You're Not Supposed to Go (1995)

2009-06-22T00:07:00.004-05:00

Not down by the storm sewer because Grandpa was watching the rain from the front window when he saw the little girl float by and he fought his way through the powerful moving river of water to save her at the last second like a newspaper hero. Not down by that ravine, because once a little boy was killed when the rushing water swept him in and he was crushed on those sharp blocks of quarried granite below. Not into a neighbor's house because of the four-year-old daughter of the preacher when Mother was little who was lured into a tornado cellar and murdered there by a teenage neighbor boy. He put his private thing in her down there in the cellar several times on days before the killing day. Not swimming, because of the polio epidemic. Not into a bar, even when you are a grown-up, because there are bad people in there drinking beer. Not into a friend's house, because if there is a fire, your friend's parents will save their own children and forget all about you and then you will burn to death. You will die.

Our back yard: parched and barren, but with one tree big enough to climb. Climbing that tree and fingering three tiny eggs in a nest. Later hearing the outraged screams of the mother bird. Mother scolding me because the mother would now abandon her eggs and the baby birds would never have life because of me. The reeling shock I felt constrict my throat. The taste of my hot tears for the little white orphaned eggs. Finding the deserted nest again the following winter, the eggs deteriorated by then to paper-thin fragments. My shame.

My doll, the one my young and tender-hearted parents purchased early because they feared I would not live the two weeks until Christmas. Mother placing the doll, boxed and wrapped in cellophane, next to me in my sick bed. Being too weak to play with that doll made for a child movie star, not for a little girl with home-made clothes living on the outskirts of an oil field. My dangerously high fever and Daddy putting me in the cold bath water in my nightgown, my throat feeling like it was slashed with barbed wire every time I swallowed my own saliva.

After I recovered, that doll was very real to me. I had others, but they were merely props I used for decorating my bed. I felt guilty about the other dolls because they knew that I did not love them, but still I could not bring myself to play with them. I left them carelessly on the floor, shoeless, hands reaching helplessly into the air. Mother complained about the clutter and demanded that I get rid of some of them. She handed me a clear plastic bag from the dry cleaners and I rapidly and ruthlessly bagged every single birthday and Christmas doll except for the one I loved. There was a trap door in the bottom of my closet to a storage space below the floorboards; a second trap door in the closet's ceiling led to the attic. I believed my closet contained secret entrances to Heaven and Hell. Mother helped me drop the big clear bag of unloved dolls down into the black hole under our house, and I felt a strange, wild exhiliration at being rid of them.

When night came, I could not rest. I thought I could hear the poor unwanted dolls weeping pathetically in the cold darkness that smelled like dirt. My heart hurt because I was such a bad mother, but eventually I cried myself to sleep. The next morning I asked Mother to come help me get the bag of dolls back, but she refused. As time passed I became afraid to go to sleep because I imagined the rejected dolls' heartbreak had gradually turned to hatred and they were plotting ways to come up through the trap door during the black of night to get their revenge on me.

*******

Daddy wanted to make something of himself so he left the oil field and took a job managing a large tenement-style apartment house; we moved into one of the vacant units. One dirty, windy afternoon a middle-aged couple invited some of us kids who were standing around watching them move in to come with them in their rusted red pick-up truck for a drive over to their old place while they loaded up more boxes. I didn't think Daddy would allow me to go with the other children, but much to my surprise, he said Okay. The wife was skinny and wrinkled, with dry faded brown hair and a red-and-white checked blouse. The man had a big western hat and a gut straining over his belt buckle. I guess they looked harmless to my father, and they sure liked kids.

All of us who went on this adventure were boys, except for me. We piled into the bed of the truck and the couple rode up front in the cab. As soon as we got on the main road I had to hold on to keep my balance. I could barely breathe because the wind resistance was so great it felt like a huge invisible smothering palm over my face. When we drove around the traffic circle I was pitched against the sharp-boned boys and I feared I would be thrown from the moving truck. The one-lane asphalt highway was just a little farther out, past the Dairy Queen and the roller rink. Maybe these people were going to kidnap us. But, no. They safely negotiated a sharp turn and headed on a few blocks to their old house, a stone one out on the highway. I had noticed this house before. It had a crescent moon window in its front door.

We crunched to a stop on the gravel driveway. I felt a little better then and silently berated myself for having thought this nice couple was going to do something bad to us. The man unlocked the kitchen door and the woman waited while we kids got out of the truck and then she held the screen door open for us, smiling, as we went into her house.

Eight years of life had not prepared me for what I beheld in the kitchen. Empty amber beer bottles sprang up from every surface like tin soldiers. There were bottles covering the kitchen table, bottles in the sink and lining the counter top, bottles on top of the stove and on top of the refrigerator. There were bottles in squashed cardboard boxes and brown paper grocery bags. Bottle tops, all the same kind -- silver with red letters -- littered the floor and tiddly-winked between the regiments of emptied bottles. The sight of all these bottles, this indisputable evidence of beer-drinking, made my stomach drop as if the cables of the elevator I rode in had snapped and I'd plummeted down a few floors. I felt blood rise to my face and heard ringing somewhere in the dark behind my eyes. I heard my own voice telling me inside my head, this is a place you're not supposed to go.

The wife offered us Cokes from the ice box, the small ones in green glass bottles, and told us we could go sit in the living room and watch television. I alone followed her in there. The others, the boys, didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with being there in that house full of beer bottles; some of them went out in the back yard to play, chasing each other through the house, dodging half-packed moving boxes. Blue cigarette smoke drifted into the living room where I sat. Motes shimmered in strips of light let in by Venetian blinds. I wanted to go home, but I could hear the grown-ups scooting back chairs at the kitchen table and the man laughing when some of the beer bottles clanked and crashed to the floor. I couldn't pay attention to the t.v. or drink my little Coke because tears were rising in my throat and my breath was shallow.

After a while the man brought the boys, in a group, into the living room. He picked up one of many yellow National Geographic from a pile on the floor, and, grinning, displayed a picture. The boys giggled and jockeyed for good positions as more pages were turned. They pointed and said things I couldn't make out. When they'd all finished looking, one of the boys absently handed the journal to me and turned his attention to another magazine the husband was showing. I let the pages flip by me one by one from the back of the magazine to the front. I wondered which article they'd all been looking at. Then I figured it out. There were photographs of beautiful chocolate-colored women, their breasts bare, wearing strings of colored beads and silver wire around their necks and wrists. Some of them were big-bellied with babies. They stood under lush green trees with huge serrated leaves speaking with an old white woman, a missionary, perhaps. I shut the magazine in shame, not because of the pictures of lovely African women, but because of how the husband's face had looked when he showed those pictures to the boys.

Then I sat on the scratchy, lumpy couch and stared straight ahead at the t.v. I thought about how much I loved my parents and how, if I got back home safely, I would try so hard to be good. My heart ached for my own home like I had left it behind forever across an ocean. I could hear the strange grown-ups laughing and clinking bottles in the kitchen as the air grew dense with cigarette smoke strata. My own voice inside my brain kept telling me over and over again, this is a place you're not supposed to go.

Eventually the grown-ups finished their beers and loaded their cardboard boxes into the truck and then they were ready to take us home. Maybe the wife even asked me what was the matter and hadn't I had a good time.

When we arrived back at the apartments I leaped out of the back of the truck and ran all the way to my own back door, slowing down and trying to seem less breathless and panicky as I swung open the screen door. Mother was busy in the kitchen. It was only late afternoon by then, but I asked to take my bath early. I ran the water hotter than usual and washed myself all over with Lava soap.

The shock of finding one long, colorless hair growing on the most secret part of my body. Thinking, this is where it all begins. Things will never be the same again. From now on, everything has to be private. Seeing and hearing a curtain fall behind my eyes somewhere, a lead-colored one, as I sat for a long time in the bathtub and the water went tepid, then cool, then cold. Going completely underwater like when I was baptized, holding my breath a long time, trying to float motionless, like fish who sleep in shallow water.

Not eating much supper that night. Being afraid to look my parents in the eyes, afraid they could tell from my dilated pupils and flushed cheeks that I had been somewhere bad. Feeling a little better when, in my own bed at last, Mother turned off my bedroom light and then no one could see that I was ashamed. Snuggling down, praying for some kind of forgiveness -- from Little Lord Jesus? from Mother and Daddy? I tried a good long time there in the dark to go to sleep.